A. James Gregor, Mussolini's Intellectuals - Fascist Social and Political Thought

MUSSOLINI’S INTELLECTUALS
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MUSSOLINI’S INTELLECTUALS
FA S C I S T S O C I A L A N D
POLITICAL THOUGHT
A. James Gregor
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2005 by Princeton University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gregor, A. James (Anthony James), 1929–
Mussolini’s intellectuals : fascist social and political thought /
A. James Gregor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 0-691-12009-9 (acid-free paper)
1. Fascism—Italy—History—20th century. 2. Intellectuals—Italy—
History—20th century. 3. Intellectuals—Italy—Political activity—History—
20th century. 4. Italy—Intellectual life—20th century. 5. Italy—Politics and
government—20th century. I. Title.
DG571.G734 2005
320.53′3′094509042—dc22
2004049133
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
pup.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
The work embodied in this book is dedicated
to all those who, willingly and unwillingly,
accompanied me on my journey.
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Contents
Preface
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
Chapter One
Some Issues in the Intellectual History of Fascism
1
Chapter Two
The Historic Background and Enrico Corradini
18
Chapter Three
Alfredo Rocco and the Elements of Fascist Doctrine
38
Chapter Four
Sergio Panunzio: From Revolutionary to National Syndicalism
61
Chapter Five
Idealism, Ugo Spirito, and the Outlines of Fascist Doctrine
85
Chapter Six
Ugo Spirito and the Rationale of the Corporative State
111
Chapter Seven
Sergio Panunzio and the Maturing of Fascist Doctrine
140
Chapter Eight
Camillo Pellizzi, Carlo Costamagna, and the Final Issues
165
Chapter Nine
Doctrinal Interlude: The Initiatic Racism of Julius Evola
191
Chapter Ten
Doctrinal Continuity and the Fascist Social Republic
222
Chapter Eleven
Conclusions
246
Index
263
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Preface
THIS BOOK appears after almost four decades of study, conferences, discussion, and publication. Over those years, students of “fascism,”1 as a
subject of inquiry, have seen its “essence” change, in the judgments of
scholars, from a movement of the “extreme right” into one that was neither of the “right” nor the “left.”2 We are now told that “Fascist ideology
represented a synthesis of organic nationalism with the antimaterialist
revision of Marxism.”3
From a political revolution entirely without any pretense of a rational
belief system, we are now told, by those best informed, that “fascism’s
ability to appeal to important intellectuals . . . underlines that it cannot
be dismissed as . . . irrational. . . . [In] truth, fascism was an ideology just
like the others.”4 Moreover, it has been acknowledged that “Fascism was
possible only if based on genuine belief.”5
In effect, the study of Italian Fascism has delivered itself of significantly
altered assessments over the past decades. Where, at one time, Fascism
was simply dismissed as a phenomenon understood to be without intellectual substance, a right-wing excrescence that invoked violence and war,
it is now more and more regularly understood to be a movement, and
a regime, predicated on a reasonably well articulated belief system that
engaged the rational commitment of many.
For all that, there remains a residue of opinion that continues to deny
Fascism the same reasoned beliefs that everyone readily grants to the political movements and regimes of Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong. We are still
told, for example, that unlike Stalinism and Maoism, “Fascism had few
true believers who could also write articles and books.”6 Strange.
One of the principal purposes of the present work is to attempt to challenge such notions. Fascist intellectuals wrote and published as many arti1
Generally the lowercase “fascism” refers to a class of movements or regimes. The term
“Fascism,” capitalized, refers to Mussolini’s political movement and regime.
2
“Fascism did not belong to the extreme Left, yet defining it as part of the extreme
Right is not very illuminating either. In many respects, fascism was not conservative at all in
inspiration.” Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), p. 13.
3
Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 6.
4
Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), pp. xix–xx, 4.
5
Laqueur, Fascism, p. 27.
6
Ibid., p. 97.
x
P R E F AC E
cles and books as apologists for any comparable system. Their quality
varied with each author, just as was, and is, the case with comparable
systems. It would be hard to convincingly argue that the intellectual yield
of authors in the former Soviet Union or Maoist China was superior in
any way to that produced by Fascist intellectuals. The expository account,
before the reader, is evidence in support of that contention.
In that context, there is a discussion made available in the present exposition that has struck several prepublication readers as anomalous. Considerable space in the text is devoted to the eccentric and “suprarational”
vagaries of Julius Evola. The reason is that there are some specialists who
seem to think that Evola was a “major” Fascist intellectual, and that he
provided the rationale for “Ur-fascism”—the belief system that animated
Fascism and all the forms of “neofascism” with which scholarship now
occupies itself.7 The discussion provided below, devoted to the thought
of Evola, is intended to serve as its counterargument. I consider the space
devoted to the exercise well spent. Conceiving Evola’s thought as “fascist” has led many scholars astray in their efforts to understand what they
imagine to be contemporary “neofascism.”8 Moreover, Evola’s notions
do document the impact of National Socialist thought on the coherence
and fundamental rationality of Fascist doctrine.
This book is essentially the conclusion of an argument I first advanced
a long time ago.9 Long resisted by my peers, the central claim—that Fascism was, in fact, animated by a credible and coherent belief system—has
now been generally accepted by those best informed. Acknowledging
that, I believe that the retrospective study of Italian Fascism—and the
inquiry into what passes, in our immediate present, as “neofascism”—
can only prosper.
Alongside all the volumes devoted to the lucubrations of Soviet, Chinese, East German, North Korean, and Albanian intellectuals in support
of their respective Marxist-Leninist dictatorships, there is space for this
one. It argues that Fascist intellectuals, in support of their dictatorship,
produced works no less competent. Even if this proves true, however, I
should make it clear at the outset that I do not view either Marxism or
Fascism as particularly plausible, and I certainly do not recommend that
we embrace either. I simply recommend that we understand them.
7
See Umberto Eco, “Pointing a Finger at the Fascists,” Guardian, 19 August 1995, p. 27.
See the discussion of neofascism in Eatwell, Fascism: A History; and Roger Griffin, The
Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991).
9
A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New
York: Free Press, 1969).
8
Acknowledgments
THE DEBT AN author owes to those who have directly or indirectly assisted
in the production of almost any work is incalculable. In the case of the
present volume, the debt is particularly great.
This book is the product of a lifetime’s preoccupation, study, and reflection. In the course of the journey, I enjoyed the counsel, the insights, and
the experience of those who have experienced more, lived more, and studied the subject more intensely than I. Many years ago, Giuseppe Prezzolini
spent several afternoons with me. He spoke of times long past—and led
me to some small comprehension of what Italy was like at the beginning
of the twentieth century for those who actually lived it. There was Ugo
Spirito and his lovely wife, who spent more time with me than I had any
reason to expect. We spoke of corporativism and economic programming.
In the time he allowed me, Ing. Giovanni Volpe and I spoke of his father,
Gioacchino Volpe, a prominent figure in Fascist intellectual circles. And
there was Julius Evola, surrounded by his acolytes, who allowed me an
interview although convinced that I was an agent of some foreign intelligence service—and Giovanni Perona, “Gamma,” who served in the armed
forces of the final days. Lastly, there was Rachele and Vittorio Mussolini,
who spoke to me of long ago things painfully remembered.
All these persons allowed me to share some of their remembrances of
time past. All of them now gone, I would like to here record my indebtedness to them for their kindnesses and their patience—to allow a stranger
to rummage through their lives.
To accomplished academics like Zeev Sternhell, Stanley Payne, Ludovico Incisa di Camerana, and Domenico Settembrini, I owe more than I
can say—certainly more than I can ever repay. To the University of California, Berkeley, I am grateful for having provided me with a stimulating
intellectual home for more than three decades—and for allowing me contact with some of the finest students in the world. To my wife, Maria Hsia
Chang, I owe all manner of good things, not the least of which is the
brood of “Little Ones” that have pleasured my life.
I am especially grateful to Ian Malcolm of Princeton University Press
for his patience and absolute professionalism. Other than all that, I am
grateful beyond measure to all the institutions in which, and all the professors with whom, I learned my trade. This book is but a small token of
appreciation for all I owe.
A. James Gregor
Berkeley
Winter 2004
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MUSSOLINI’S INTELLECTUALS
CHAPTER ONE
Some Issues in the Intellectual
History of Fascism
FOR ABOUT three-quarters of a century, almost all academic discussion
concerning Mussolini’s Fascism1 has tended to imagine the movement it
animated, and the regime it informed, as entirely lacking a reasoned rationale. It early became commonplace to attribute to Fascism a unique irrationality, accompanied by a ready recourse to violence. Fascism, it has
been argued, was full of emotion, but entirely empty of cognitive content.
Fascists were, and are, understood to have renounced all rational discourse, in order to “glorify the non-rational.” Their ideology, movement,
revolution, and behavior were made distinctive by the appeal to two, and
only two, “absolutes”: “violence and war.”2
Before the advent of the Second World War, some analysts had gone so
far as to insist that “fascism” was the product of “orgasm anxiety,” a sexual dysfunction that found release only in “mystic intoxication,” homicidal
hostility, and the complete suppression of rational thought.3 Marxists and
fellow travelers argued that since Fascism was “the violent attempt of decaying capitalism to defeat the proletarian revolution and forcibly arrest
the growing contradictions of its whole development,” it could not support
itself with a sustained rationale. Its conceptions were “empty and hollow,”
finding expession in “deceitful terminology” consciously designed to conceal the “realities of class-rule and class-exploitation.”4
For many, “Fascism [was] essentially a political weapon adopted by the
ruling class . . . that takes root in the minds of millions . . . [appealing] to
certain uncritical and infantile impulses which, in a people debarred from
a rational, healthy existence . . . tend to dominate their mental lives.”
Fascism, in general, constituted a “flight from reason,” advancing “the
1
When the term “fascism” is employed in lowercase, it refers to a presumptive, inclusive,
generic fascism. When the term is capitalized, it refers to the movement, revolution, and
regime associated with Benito Mussolini.
2
Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. x,
13, 14, 17.
3
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933; reprint, New York: Orgone
Institute, 1946), pp. 110–11.
4
R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (1934; reprint, San Francisco: Proletarian Publishers, 1974), pp. 198–99.
2
CHAPTER ONE
claims of mysticism and intuition in opposition . . . to reason . . . and
glorifying the irrational.”5
While there were some serious treatments of Fascist thought that made
their appearance between the two world wars,6 all objectivity dissolved
in the alembic of the Second. By the time of the Second World War, Fascism had simply merged into Hitler’s National Socialism—and discussants spoke of “nazi-fascism” as though the two were indissolubly one.7
Generic fascism was the enemy of “Western ideals,” of the “Enlightenment tradition,” as well as of the sociopolitical and philosophical aspirations of the French Revolution. It was the unregenerate agent of evil,
driven by an irrational mysticism, and committed to mayhem and gross
inhumanity. By the end of the 1990s, there were those who could insist
that “fascism shuffles together every myth and lie that the rotten history
of capitalism has ever produced like a pack of greasy cards and then deals
them out.” As with Angelo Tasca, such a notion is advanced in support
of a contention that the only use Fascism, like Mussolini, had “of ideas
was to dispense with ideas.”8
By the end of the twentieth century, there was a conviction that a generic fascism existed that included a curious collection of radically diverse
political phenomena that ranged from General Augusto Pinochet’s coup
in Chile, the French Front National, Jorg Haider’s Austrian Freedom
Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Russian Liberal Democratic Party, Italy’s
Alleanza nazionale, to the terroristic lunacy of Timothy McVeigh and
Muslim fundamentalists.9 “Fascism” had become, largely, a meaningless
term of abuse.
What remained constant over seven decades was the incorrigible conviction that “paradigmatic Fascism,” the Fascism of Mussolini, was
“based on myths, intuition, instinct . . . and the irrational, rather than on
a closely argued system based on a detailed analysis of historical, political
and economic trends.”10 Given such a characterization, Italian Fascism
has been considered the anti-intellectual source for all the “right wing”
political movements of the past century. In fact, some commentators have
held that all contemporary right-wing movements find their origin in a
single “Ur-fascism”—an identifiable fons et origo malorum. While Fas5
R. Osborn, The Psychology of Reaction (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), pp. 5,
238, 239.
6
The best of these included that of Herbert W. Schneider, Making the Fascist State (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1928).
7
See, for example, Eduardo Haro Tecglen, Fascismo: Genesis y desarrollo (Madrid: CVS
Ediciones, 1975).
8
Dave Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 1999), pp. 27–28.
9
See ibid., chap. 1; and Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pts. 2 and 3.
10
Laqueur, Fascism, p. 96.
I N T E L L E C T U A L H I S T O RY O F FA S C I S M
3
cism, in and of itself, apparently possessed no identifiable ideological substance—being little more than a collage of contradictory ideas —it has
been argued that whatever ideas are to be found, they are shared by every
right-wing political impulse. Given that Fascism had no content, it seems
that what is shared is the tendency to irrationality and violence. It is not
clear how helpful such a classificatory strategy might be in any effort to
undertake a responsible history of ideas.
Generic fascism, it would seem, shares a common, if irrational, substance with the entire political right wing. That substance, devoid of
meaning, finds its origin in the nonthought of Mussolini’s apologists. It
is argued that the nonideology of fascism is linearly related to all the
“extremist” thought of contemporary Europe and North America. We
are told that if we would discuss contemporary extremist thought, we
must “denotatively define” the range of our inquiry—and definition be
made in terms of its “ideology”—and, finally, that “the extreme right’s
ideology is provided by fascism.”11
Fascist studies, it would seem, as an intellectual, historic, and social
science discipline, has collapsed into a clinical study of an omnibus, psychopathic “right-wing extremism.” “By extreme right” is meant “that
political/ideological space where fascism is the key reference”—with fascism being little more than a “pathological form of social and political
energy.”12 As a consequence, the study of Italian Fascism is treated as the
antechamber to the scrutiny of contemporary right-wing political psychopathology—to include any and all groups, movements or regimes that
have been identified by anyone as “fascist,” any time during the twentieth,
and now the twenty-first, centuries—as well as any that might somehow
be associated with one or another form of irrationalism and criminal violence. Under such circumstances, fascism studies, as a discipline, expanded into a circle of inquiries that now includes soccer thugs, skinhead
fanatics, graveyard vandals, anti-Semites, racists, and terrorists of all and
whatever sort.13 Some have suggested that “in the West,” one might
profitably study Ronald Reagan Republicans as well.14
11
Piero Ignazi, “The Extreme Right in Europe: A Survey,” in Peter H. Merkl and Leonard
Weinberg, eds., The Revival of Right-Wing Extremism in the Nineties (London: Frank Cass,
1997), p. 48.
12
Ibid., p. 49; Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1991), p. xii.
13
Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, pp. 8–9. See the intricate and fascinating treatment of all these “fascist” individuals and groups by Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day:
Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1997).
14
See the discussion in Leonard Weinberg, “Conclusions,” in Merkl and Weinberg, eds.,
The Revival of Right-Wing Extremism in the Nineties, pp. 278–79.
4
CHAPTER ONE
The “extreme right” is essentially and irremediably irrational and criminal—because Fascism was uniquely irrational and criminal.15 The connection advanced is an empirical one. To be convincing, it would have to
be shown that Fascists in general, and Fascist intellectuals in particular,
were possessed of nothing that might pass as right reason or moral purpose—and that somehow the contemporary “right-wing extremists”
share that unfortunate disability.
Given the prevailing clutch of opinions, one might easily anticipate the
outcome. With the absence of any discriminating list of traits—other than
irrationality and bestiality—one might well have predicted that it would
be impossible for research to distinguish fascists from simple lunatics and
ordinary footpads. Today, in common usage, the word “fascist” does little
more than “conjure up visions of nihilistic violence, war and Götterdämmerung,” together with a “world of . . . uniforms and discipline, of bondage and sadomasochism.”16
The term hardly has any cognitive reference at all. By and large, the
term “fascism” has only pejorative uses. It is employed to disparage and
defame.
None of that should puzzle laypersons. It is a heritage of usage made
commonplace during the Second World War. In the course of that war, the
term “fascist” was employed to refer indiscriminately to both Mussolini’s
Fascism and Hitler’s National Socialism—irrespective of the fact that serious National Socialist theoreticians rarely, if ever, referred to their belief
system, their movement, or their regime as “fascist.” Similarly, Fascist intellectuals never identified their ideology or their political system as “National Socialist.” The notion of a generic fascism that encompassed Italian
Fascism, German National Socialism, Spanish Falangism, Portugese National Syndicalism, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, and the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael, among an indeterminate number of others,
was largely an artifact of the war. Rarely, if ever, was a serious comparative
study undertaken that might provide the grounds for identification. As a
result, membership of all or any of those political movements in the class
of “fascisms” has been a matter of contention ever since.17
15
See Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, p. 18.
Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. xix.
17
Renzo De Felice, perhaps the most knowledgeable scholar in the field of fascism studies, had rejected the notion of a class of regimes that might be identified as “fascist.” See
Renzo De Felice, Interpretations of Fascism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977),
pp. 10–11, 180; and Fascism: An Informal Introduction to Its Theory and Practice (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1976), pp. 92–96. Zeev Sternhell has argued that “Fascism
can in no way be identified with Nazism.” Sternhell, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri,
The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 4.
16
I N T E L L E C T U A L H I S T O RY O F FA S C I S M
5
In our own time, any individual or group of individuals that might in
some sense, or some measure, be identified as “extremely irrational,”18
“antidemocratic,” “racist,” or “nationalist,” is identified as “neofascist,”
“parafascist,” “quasi-fascist,” or “cryptofascist.” “Fascism” has devolved into a conceptual term whose grasp far exceeds its reach—almost
entirely devoid of any ability to offer empirical distinctions that might
serve any cognitive purpose. Entirely devoid of meaning, the term is used
arbitrarily, generally with little empirical reference to any historical, social, or political reality.
Because the notion that Fascism might have had ideological convictions, or a rational program for its revolution and the regime it
fostered and sustained, is dismissed, explanations for its rise and success are sought in individual and collective psychopathology or “historic
circumstances.”19 A variety of these efforts have been made. None
have been notably successful. One of the more common has been to
associate fascism with “an ideology generated by modern industrial
capitalism.”20
It is not at all clear what that can be taken to mean. Fascism would
appear to have an ideology—however internally contradictory and meaningless. It is confidently asserted that fascist ideology, however meaningless, is apparently the specific product of “modern industrial capitalism.”
The putative causal association is difficult to interpret. It could not
possibly mean that Italian Fascism arose in an environment of modern
industrial capitalism. Informed Marxists have long since recognized that
Fascism arose and prevailed on the Italian peninsula in what was, without
question, a transitional and only marginalized industrial environment.
There was very little that was modern about the Italian economy at the
time of the First World War. In 1924, Antonio Gramsci—usually identified as among the more astute of analysts—spoke of the political successes
of Fascism as following, in part, from the fact that “capitalism [in Italy]
was only weakly developed.”21
Perhaps the reference to “modern capitalism” can be taken to mean any
capitalism at all. Since capitalism is a modern product, the insistence that
fascist ideology is the product of modern capitalism may simply mean that
the ideology of fascism appears only in a capitalist environment. If that is
18
Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, p. 18.
See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Interpretations of Fascism (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Transaction, 1997).
20
Neocleous, Fascism, p. xi.
21
Antonio Gramsci, “Fascismo e forze borghesi tradizionali,” in Sul fascismo (Rome:
Riuniti, 1973), p. 217.
19
6
CHAPTER ONE
what is intended, it is not very helpful. Some forms of “fascism” (however
conceived) have evidently appeared in noncapitalist environments.22
More than that, for some commentators, any ideology, doctrine, or
intellectual rationale for fascism would have to be, on its face, irrational
and contradictory. For Marxist intellectuals, any individual or movement
that failed to anticipate the imminent collapse of capitalism and the advent of the proletarian revolution was deemed irrational, incapable of the
most elementary rationality. For a Marxist like Gramsci, any ideology
other than Marxism could only be contradictory and irrational. Italian
Fascism, as a non-Marxism, simply could not have a coherent ideology.
Any intellectuals who sought to provide its vindication could only be bereft of reason and morality.
Whether the product of senescent, established, or emergent capitalism,
Fascism was apparently not capable of formulating a consistent belief
system—because, for Gramsci (as was the case for all Marxists), Fascism
itself was a “contradictory” movement representing a middle-class attempt to avoid “proletarianization” in a capitalist environment. Marx
had always contended that industrial capitalism would inevitably generate concentrations of enterprise at the cost of small and medium industry.
As a predictable consequence, more and more members of the “middle
class” would be jettisoned into the proletariat.
According to Gramsci, however weakly developed capitalism may
have been in post–World War One Italy, Mussolini was nonetheless “fatally driven to assist in [its] historic development.”23 In Gramsci’s judgment, it seemed transparent that Fascism could not represent the efforts
of the middle class to resist proletarianization and at the same time assist
capitalism in its historic development. Fascism could not do both without
“contradiction.”
Why such a course should inescapeably prove “contradictory” is explicable only if one assumes that the development of capitalism must necessarily “proletarianize” the middle classes. One could not pursue a course
of industrialization without sacrificing the middle classes. Marx, after all,
had insisted that industrialization would inevitably reduce the class inventory of modern society to but two: the proletariat and grand capital. As
capitalist plant became increasingly large, complex, and costly, the larger,
more complex, and costly would swallow the smaller, simpler, and less
capital intensive. Fewer and fewer middle-class capitalists would survive
22
See the discussions in Alexander Yanov, The Russian New Right: Right-Wing Ideologies
in the Contemporary USSR (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1978); and A. James
Gregor, Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1999), chap. 7.
23
Gramsci, “Tra realtà e arbitrio,” in Socialismo e fascismo: L’ordine nuovo, 1921–1922
(Turin: Einaudi, 1967), p. 302.
I N T E L L E C T U A L H I S T O RY O F FA S C I S M
7
the winnowing. Over time and with greater and greater frequency, members of the lesser bourgeoisie would become proletarians. According to
Marx, the petite bourgeoisie was a class destined for extinction in a social
environment analogous to the biological struggle for survival—in which
the “weaker” were destined for extinction as the “fittest” survive.
According to the thesis, Fascism was driven to support capitalist industrial development—even though that development would destroy the middle classes, the very recruitment base of the movement. Given those convictions, Marxists could only imagine that Fascist normative and
doctrinal appeals would have to be “contradictory”—devoid of real significance. That conviction could only be predicated on the “scientific”
truth that as industrial capitalism advances, the petite bourgeoisie would
necessarily suffer gradual extinction. And yet, petite bourgeois elements
persist in all, including the most advanced, capitalist societies. Those elements may assume different functions, and take on different properties,
but they survive and prosper, no matter what the stage of industrialization. The notion that one could not consistently represent the middle
classes and at the same time advocate rapid industrial development seems
to be empirically disconfirmed.
It would seem that, in an informal discipline like intellectual history,
rather than accepting the postulate that a given “theory of history” is true,
thereby rendering it “necessary” that Fascist ideology must be contradictory and empty of substance, one might first apply oneself to a detailed
inspection of that ideology, to judge it on its own merit. The alternative
would appear to be nothing other than a dedicated search for self-serving
“contradictions.” As will be suggested, it is not at all self-evident that Mussolini’s pursuit of industrialization inescapably involved contradictions—
or that such contradictions surfaced in Fascist doctrine.24
All that notwithstanding, some contemporary analysts insist that Mussolini’s Fascism, like all fascism, was and is a product of industrial capitalism, whether emergent, mature, or senescent. As such, according to such
appraisals, it will always be irrational and contradictory because it casts
itself athwart the tide of history—the imminent and inevitable anticapitalist proletarian revolution.25 Again, in order to defend such notions, one
would have to defend all its associated, but interred, premises. One would
have to assume that history had one and only one course—culminating
in the “ineluctable” revolution of the proletariat. There is little objective
evidence to support any of that.
These are the kinds of curiosities to be found in considerable abundance
throughout the literature devoted to the study of the intellectual substance
24
25
See the discussion in Gramsci, “Il fascismo e la sua politica,” in Sul fascismo, p. 304.
See the discussion in Neocleous, Fascism.
8
CHAPTER ONE
of Mussolini’s Fascism. The result has been an inability of historians and
political scientists to deal, in some significant measure, with the intellectual history not only of Fascism, but with the history of the twentieth
century as well—and whatever influence that history might have on the
political life of the twenty-first.
The identification of fascism with the exclusive interests of capitalism,
the petite bourgeoisie, together with a rage against Enlightenment values
and the political fancies of the French Revolution—to see Fascism the
paladin of the world’s machine and market economy, to make of Fascism
the foundation of modern evil—seems to satisfy a deep and abiding psychological hunger among many in our postmodern circumstances, but
assists us very little in the effort to understand either the twentieth century
or our own troubled times. There is the evident necessity, among some
analysts, to identify fascism, however understood, not with any syndrome
of ideas, but with late capitalism, ultranationalism, racism, antifeminism,
and every antidemocratic impulse—simple violence, bourgeois perversity,
and irremediable irrationality. As a consequence, many commentators
choose to see “fascism” as a right-wing excrescence, exclusively as a “recurrent feature of capitalism”—a “form of counterrevolution acting in
the interests of capital.” Burdened with all these moral and intellectual
disabilities, Fascism could only be inspired by an evil and “very contradictory ideology” in the service of what has been frequently identified as a
capitalistic “open dictatorship of high finance.”26
Of course, it was not always so. Prior to the Second World War, while
non-Marxists, in general, deplored Fascism,27 there were American intellectuals who were not prepared to identify Fascism with either capitalism
or incarnate evil. There were even those prepared to acknowledge that
Mussolini’s movement and regime was, in fact, possessed of a reasonably
well articulated and coherent belief system.28
All of that dramatically changed with the coming of the Second World
War. It served the purposes of that conflict to dismiss Fascist ideology as
not only evil, but as internally inconsistent and fundamentally irrational
26
Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, pp. 3, 16–17, 25. To all that, Renzo De Felice,
perhaps the best informed historian of Fascism, states simply, “It is unthinkable that Italy’s
great economic forces wanted to bring fascism to power.” De Felice, Fascism: An Informal
Introduction to Its Theory and Practice, p. 63.
27
See the account in John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), chap. 17.
28
For example, Schneider, Making the Fascist State; Paul Einzig, The Economic Foundations of Fascism (London: Macmillan and Co., 1933); and William G. Welk, Fascist Economic Policy: An Analysis of Italy’s Economic Experiment (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1938). Welk speaks of Fascist ideology as a “curious mixture of Nationalism and
Socialist doctrine” (p. 11)—and of the “philosophy upon which the new Fascist state was
to be based” as “set forth in detail” (p. 20)—but he nowhere speaks of its “irrationality.”
I N T E L L E C T U A L H I S T O RY O F FA S C I S M
9
as well. Left-wing notions, already abundant in the intellectual atmosphere, were quickly pressed into service—to become fixtures for years
thereafter.
Only decades after the passions of the most destructive war in human
history had abated did some academics, once more, find “a coherent body
of thought” among Fascist thinkers.29 Thus, in 1994, Zeev Sternhell affirmed that “the intellectual content of fascism had the same importance
in the growth and development of the movement as it had in liberalism
or later in Marxism.”30 In effect, some scholars were prepared to grant
that the intellectual folk wisdom that held that Fascism was innocent of
doctrinal coherence was less than simply unconvincing—it was in error.
Some have sought to provide a justification for the conviction that fascism was irrational, and devoid of ideological sophistication, by pointing
out that there were “radical differences” between Fascism’s revolutionary
tenets “and the realities to which it [gave] rise.”31 The argument is not at
all persuasive, for if the marked discrepancies between antecedent ideological affirmations and the realities that emerge after successful revolution were enough to identify a political creed as “irrational,” one of the
first to so qualify would be the Marxism of revolutionary Bolshevism.
V. I. Lenin anticipated the “withering away” of the state to be among
the first consequences of successful revolution. That would entail the advent of anarchistic government, peace, “workers’ emancipation,” and
“voluntary centralism.”32 The fact is that everything of the subsequent
reality of the Soviet Union belied all that. Almost everything about postrevolutionary Russia stood in stark and emphatic contrast to the specific
theoretical anticipations that had carried the Bolsheviks to the October
Revolution. The differences, in fact, were more emphatic than anything
to be found in the comparison of Fascist thought and Fascist practice.
If the discrepancies between doctrinal formulations and the reality that
emerges out of revolution were a measure of “irrationality” or the potential for violence, then Lenin’s Bolshevism was perhaps the most irrational
and violence-prone doctrine of the twentieth century.
Actually, the conviction that Mussolini’s Fascism had no ideology to
speak of—or that whatever tenets it entertained were irrational and contradictory—is the product of a complex series of conjectures that arose
out of the political circumstances of the first quarter of the twentieth cenThe thought of Fascist intellectuals is presented with accuracy and academic detachment in
chap. 2.
29
Eatwell, Fascism, p. xix.
30
Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, p. 4.
31
See Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, p. 18.
32
V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution in Selected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages
Press, 1950–51), vol. 2, p. 251.
10
CHAPTER ONE
tury. Through the nineteenth century, Marxism had assumed the mantle
of revolutionary responsibility—the presumptive solitary hope of proletarian emancipation. Within the first two decades of the twentieth century, Marxism, as Marxism-Leninism, inspired the revolution that overwhelmed czarist Russia in 1917. Out of that successful revolution, the
Third International—the Leninist international—was born.
About the same time, Benito Mussolini was beginning to bring together those elements that were to constitute the first Fascism. In the
years that followed, Mussolini’s Fasci di combattimento defeated the
antinational revolutionary socialists, to dismantle their entire organizational and communications infrastructure. Among the socialists of the
peninsula, it was uncertain what had transpired. Antonio Gramsci himself was clearly confused.
Gramsci recognized that initially Fascism had opposed socialism not
necessarily because Fascism was antisocialist, but because official socialism had opposed Italy’s entry into the First World War. That opposition
arose, in Mussolini’s judgment, out of socialism’s unreflecting antinationalism.33 Gramsci argued that only when its antisocialism attracted “capitalist” support did Fascism become the “White guard” of the “bourgeoisie”—the military arm of the bourgeois government of Giovanni Giolitti.
Gramsci went on to argue that since Fascists possessed no “historic role”
of their own, they could do no more than serve as janissaries of the government of Giolitti.34
Later, after it became evident that Fascism was not simply an adjunct
to Italy’s bourgeois government, Gramsci was to go on to argue that Fascism was a special product of Italian industrial capitalism’s “inability to
dominate the nation’s forces of production within the confines of a free
market.” Fascism was pressed into service to create a “strong state” that
could be used not only against the emerging proletariat of the peninsula,
but against any organized resistance to capitalist hegemony.35 Fascism was
no longer seen as ancillary to the process, but its critical center. That
implied that all classes and fragments of classes, other than the industrial
capitalists, who sought the creation of a repressive state, might be united
against Fascism.
But that was not clear. A little later, by early 1921, Gramsci no longer
identified Fascism with industrial capitalism but as “the final representative of the urban petty bourgeoisie.” Gramsci had already convinced himself that Fascism was doomed, by history, to discharge reactionary purpose—what remained uncertain was the identity of the class in whose
33
See Gramsci, “I due fascismi,” in Sul fascismo, p. 133.
“La forza dello Stato,” in Sul fascismo, pp. 92–95.
35
“Cos’è la reazione?” in Sul fascismo, pp. 89–91.
34
I N T E L L E C T U A L H I S T O RY O F FA S C I S M
11
service that purpose was discharged.36 It was uncertain whom Fascism
was understood to serve. Sometimes it was simply a generic “capitalism.”
At other times, it was one of capitalism’s component classes or subclasses.
Since that issue remained unresolved, Fascism’s pronouncements and its
behaviors must necessarily have appeared both contradictory and irrational to Gramsci and the intellectuals of the Italian left.
Given his Marxist convictions, Gramsci was certain that the First World
War had irretrievably impaired the survival capacity of industrial capitalism. Capitalism had entered its “final crisis.” Any effort at revival was
doomed to failure. Any political movement that sought the rehabilitation
of capitalism, in any form, was hopelessly reactionary—seeking to restore
what history had deemed irretrievably lost. Worldwide proletarian revolution was on history’s immediate agenda. Whether composed of Nationalists, National Syndicalists, or Fascists, any movement opposed to the
unalterable course of history could only proffer contradictory, irrational,
and abstract doctrines.
As a Marxist, Gramsci knew history’s future course. He held that any
political movement not committed to that course was, of necessity, not
only irrational and counterrevolutionary, but reactionary as well. Such
movements must, necessarily, represent nonproletarian agrarian and industrial elements condemned by history to its “ashbin”—to reaction,
counterrevolution, and confusion.37
Given that set of convictions, one did not have to consider the intrinsic
merits of the non-Marxist ideological formulations found in Fascist
thought. The very best of non-Marxist doctrinal statements could be
nothing other than “ideological abstractions.”38 Since capitalism had finally lapsed into that last “general crisis” foretold by Marx in the midnineteenth century,39 the future was clear. All twentieth-century political
movements not committed to proletarian revolution must necessarily be
contradictory as well as irrational—and because counterrevolutionary,
violent.
By the time of Fascism’s accession to power on the peninsula, Marxists
of all kinds, and their fellow travelers, were desperately searching for the
key to the understanding of the complex events that had overtaken them.
“Ahistoric” and “counterrevolutionary” elements had somehow succeeded in overwhelming Marxism and political progressivism that had
been commissioned, by history, to transform the world. It was at that
36
“Il popolo delle scimmie,” in Sul fascismo, pp. 96–99.
See “Il sindacalismo integrale,” and “La fase attuale della lotta,” in Sul fascismo, pp.
50–52, 77.
38
“Il sindacalismo integrale,” in Sul fascismo, p. 54.
39
“Italia e Spagna,” in Sul fascismo, p. 105.
37
12
CHAPTER ONE
juncture that Clara Zetkin affirmed that Mussolini’s success was not the
simple consequence of military victory; it was “an ideological and political victory over the working class movement”40
That did not mean, in the least, that Fascism employed an ideology
that enjoyed superiority over that of Marxism. What it meant was that
Marxists had not employed inherited “theory” to best advantage. Prior to
its victory, Marxists had not understood the “essence” of Fascism. Once
understood, there was an aggressive effort among members of the Third
International to formulate a convincing account of Italian Fascism to better counteract its toxin. Unfortunately, there was never to be any consistency among the Marxist assessments. Marxist theoreticians settled on
only one consistency: Fascism was deemed counterrevolutionary, opposed
to the course of history. So disposed, Fascism had to be, necessarily, irrational—and, as irrational, contradictory.
Other than that, Marxists were to characterize Fascism in any number
of overlapping, and sometimes mutually exclusive, fashion. At first it was
seen as a rural, agrarian reaction, in the service of those possessed of
extensive landholdings. Then it was understood to be enlisted in the service of the urban middle classes. Then it was envisaged the creature of
industrialists. Then it was conceived the instrument of finance capitalists.
Some even attempted to portray Fascism as the tool of all such interests
in all their complexity.41
By the mid-1930s, most of the proffered Marxist interpretations of Fascism had become standardized under the weight of Stalinist orthodoxy.42
Fascism was the creature and the tool of “finance capitalism,” struggling
to survive during the end-days of the final crisis of capitalism.43 As capitalism sank into its inevitable and irreversible decline, Fascism was compelled to ratchet down the nation’s productive processes in the effort to
sustain monopoly price levels. Finance capitalists, the owners of the
means of production, demanded that Fascism limit production, curtail
technological innovation and systematically destroy inventory. What was
attempted was an artificially reduced, stabilized but profitable rate of con40
Clara Zetkin, “Der Kampf gegen den Faschismus,” in Ernst Nolte, ed., Theorien ueber
den Faschismus (Berlin: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1967), p. 99.
41
See the discussion in Gregor, Interpretations of Fascism, chap. 5; and The Faces of
Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), chap. 2.
42
See the comments in the “Introduction” to David Beetham, ed., Marxists in Face of
Fascism: Writings by Marxists on Fascism from the Inter-war Years (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), particularly p. 1.
43
Georgi Dimitroff, “The United Front against War and Fascism,” Report to the Seventh
World Congress of the Communist International, 1935 (New York: Gamma Publishing Co.,
n.d.), p. 7, passim.
I N T E L L E C T U A L H I S T O RY O F FA S C I S M
13
sumption. Completely cartelized or monopolized production was distributed in fixed quantitites calculated to maximize profit.44
The maximization of profit would be pursued at the cost of technological proficiency and productivity. That would necessarily impair the efficiency and survival potential of Fascist military capabilities. Fascism was
seen as an institutional irrationality, driving Italy into international conflict
through irredentist demands while, at the same time, reducing the technological and industrial output of Italy’s economic system to preindustrial
levels—thus crippling any military potentialities the nation might have developed. Under Fascism, Italy would be reduced to a “lower technical and
economic level” as a consequence of the constraints imposed by productive
relations—property and distributive modalities—that had become obsolete.45 Torn by the contradictions dictated by the “laws of history,” Fascism
could only compel the economy of the Italian peninsula to spiral down
into economic senescence. Whatever the consequences, Mussolini had no
alternative but to drive the nation into catastrophic wartime destruction.
Fascism was animated exclusively by political, economic, and military irrationality and an irrepressible impulse to collective violence. All of these
notions easily fed into the passions of the Second World War.
For all that, there was to be no closure for those who sought a credible
interpretation of Fascism, and its ideological expressions, in whatever
form. During the quarter century that followed the Second World War,
both Soviet and Chinese Communist Marxists began to reinterpret their
understanding of Mussolini’s Fascism, international capitalism, and the
history of the twentieth century. Very soon the notion that Fascism was
the inevitable product of capitalism in its final crisis was abandoned—
and the conviction that capitalism would inevitably collapse because of
its “internal contradictions” was similarly foresworn.
The economic growth rate in the post–World War Two West clearly
discredited the belief that capitalism had been, or was, suffering its terminal crisis. Industrial capitalism had clearly entered an ascending trajectory
of growth. It followed that the Fascism of the interwar years could hardly
have been the product of a moribund capitalism.
By the mid-1960s, Soviet Marxists argued that Fascism was only one
political form that contemporary capitalism might assume. More than
that, they granted that Fascism was neither a creature nor a tool of finance
capital. Nor was it a function of the ownership of property. Fascism, we
were told, exercised power over Italy independent of whoever owned the
44
R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (New York: International Publishers,
1934), pp. 225–26.
45
Ibid., pp. 103, 206–8.
14
CHAPTER ONE
means of production.46 More than that, rather than supervising the productive and technological retrogression of Italian industry, Fascism administered its growth. By the beginning of the 1970s, we were told that rather
than undermining productive output, “fascism really represented a development of capitalist forces of production. . . . It represented industrial development, technological innovation and an increase in the productivity of
labor.” We were informed that after the First World War, Fascist Italy’s
“industrial recovery . . . was the strongest in capitalist Europe” and after
the Great Depression, its recovery “was quite spectacular.”47
At about the same time, other Marxists informed us that after the First
World War, Fascism emerged as “the only political form adequate to the
new phase of capitalist development.” Fascism was “an objectively progressive, anti-capitalist, and . . . antiproletarian movement . . . that fulfilled an historical function. . . .” It was argued that Italian Fascism provided the conditions for a period of extensive growth on the peninsula
that had only begun at the turn of the twentieth century. It was held that
in the retrograde conditions of the economically underdeveloped peninsula, the notion of a socialist revolution was entirely counterproductive.
Associated as it was with “trade union demands,” the account continued,
socialism “hindered capitalist accumulation, prevented the modernization of the economic structure of the country, and completely ruined the
petty bourgeois strata without offering them any opportunity. . . . Italian
Fascism remained the only progressive solution.”48
The most familiar claims had characterized Fascist thought as contradictory and incoherent—as a simple pastiche of themes, without any intrinsic meaning. Given the transformations that had proceeded over time,
all of that was critically reviewed. Non-Marxists began to speak of Fascist
thought as “fascinating,” as having elaborated myths “far more powerful
and psychologically astute than that provided either by its liberal or socialist rivals.”49 At about the same time, others affirmed that Fascism’s
political ideology, “taken as a whole, represented a coherent, logical and
well-structured totality.”50 In 1997, others spoke of a “coherent body of
thought” that lay behind the reigning stereotype of Fascist doctrinal irra46
See the discussion and the source citations in Gregor, The Faces of Janus, chap. 3.
Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: NLB, 1974), pp. 98–99.
48
Mihaly Vajda, “The Rise of Fascism in Italy and Germany,” Telos no. 12 (Summer
1972), pp. 6, 9–10, 11, 12; see also Vajda, Fascisme et mouvement de masse (Paris: Le
sycomore, 1979), pp. 73–78, 121–24.
49
See J. T. Schnapp, “18BL: Fascist Mass Spectacle,” Representations, no. 43 (1993), pp.
90, 92–93.
50
Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, p. 8.
47
I N T E L L E C T U A L H I S T O RY O F FA S C I S M
15
tionality.51 Still others spoke vaguely of fascism’s ideology as “relatively
original, coherent and homogeneous.”52 There was a tendency among
more serious scholars to reevaluate the omnibus judgments about Fascist
doctrine that had influenced “committed” scholars.
The “revisionism” that resulted was not uniformly welcomed. With the
changes that were becoming more and more apparent in the field of fascism studies during the 1990s, some warned that they presaged a cynical
and manipulative attack against decency and democracy.53 Some scholars
attempted to reconstruct a framework that might still capture the full
malevolence that had been attributed to Fascism by making Fascism the
direct ancestor of an inclusive ideological “right.” That the right was irremediably evil remained prominent in the institutional memory of many
intellectuals. By the early 1990s, as a consequence, there was a tendency
among some thinkers in the advanced industrial countries to retreat to
the antifascist formulations of the interwar years. There could be nothing
“progressive” about fascism. It was not to be seen as discharging any
“historic function.” More than all that, its ideology was to be understood
once again as devoid of reason, as fundamentally irrational, and as remorselessly homicidal.
In those years, a wave of new publications appeared, particularly in the
anglophone countries, that sought to deliver a convincing interpretation
of fascism that might still accommodate the notions so prevalent during
the times of committed scholarship. There seemed to have been a genuine
revulsion among some scholars to the thought that Mussolini’s Fascism
might be considered as having been “underpinned by a genuine intellectual base.”54
It is in that parlous state that the study of Mussolini’s Fascism and the
assessment of contemporary “extremism” finds itself. It is evident that
many scholars concern themselves with the instances of senseless violence
that trouble Europe and North America in the twenty-first century—terrorist attacks on innocents, murder at soccer matches, vandalism of
houses of worship, attacks on immigrants, together with a host of other
atrocities. To identify these criminal acts as “fascist” is neither informative nor does it advance the cause of their suppression. Beyond that, the
entire notion that graveyard vandals and race-baiters are fascists does
nothing to reduce the confusion that has traditionally attended the study
of Italian Fascism.
51
Eatwell, Fascism, p. xix.
Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, p. xii.
53
R.J.B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 231–38.
54
See the response by Bosworth, ibid., p. 23.
52
16
CHAPTER ONE
Among the desperate efforts made to find the irrationality and malevolence that typifies contemporary mayhem in a Fascist source, some have
seized on the work of Julius Evola.55 Elevated to the stature of “the philosopher of Fascism,” Evola has been identified as one of the principal
sources of “right-wing extremism.”
The fact is that whatever the case might be with respect to Evola’s
connections with contemporary extremism, there are virtually no grounds
for identifying him as a spokesman for Fascist doctrine. Such an identification has become possible only because Fascism as an historic reality has
receded further and further into the mists of stereotypy and political science fiction. An entire quarter century of Italian history has taken on the
banal qualities of a poor morality play. Fascism no longer appears as an
historical reality, but becomes a waking horror, without substance and
without an intellectual history.
In fact, Italian Fascism has very little, if anything, to do with either
Julius Evola or modern extremism of whatever sort. Those today identified as “neofascists,” “cryptofascists,” and “parafascists” are, most frequently, not fascists at all, but persons suffering clinical afflictions.
There are a great many reasons why one could not expect to find Fascists
among the marginal persons of the postindustrial Western communities.
The problems that concerned the revolutionary intellectuals of the Italian
peninsula at the advent of the twentieth century are no longer issues for
their successors. In order to understand something of all that, one would
have to be familiar with the evolving ideology of historic Fascism.
To begin to understand the ideology of Fascism—with whatever rationality and coherence it possessed—one would have to acquire some familiarity with its emerging substance as it traversed the entire course of its
historic parabola. That would require familiarizing oneself with a substantial body of primary doctrinal literature: that of Italian nationalism,
idealism, and syndicalism. Only by doing something like that—something
that has only rarely been done—might one begin to understand how Fascist thought enjoyed the measure of coherence and intelligibility that it
has been typically denied.
More than that, one would be required to provide a catalog of central
themes to be found in the earliest formulations of Mussolini’s Fascism.
Such a roster of political, economic, and social intentions would afford a
convenient and responsible guide to the dynamic evolution that governed
Fascism’s complex rationale.
All of that is available in the best of the doctrinal literature produced
by some of Italy’s most gifted intellectuals after the termination of the
55
See, for example, the treatment of Evola in Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, pp. 47, 51,
69, 147, 152, 169, 172; Eatwell, Fascism, pp. 253–55, 263, 270, 313–14, 319, 321, 341.
I N T E L L E C T U A L H I S T O RY O F FA S C I S M
17
First World War. The fact is that much of Fascism’s rationale, as Zeev
Sternhell has persuasively argued, had been “fully elaborated even before
the movement came to power.”56 Internationally celebrated scholars such
as Giovanni Gentile, a philosophic nationalist and idealist, and Roberto
Michels, a revolutionary syndicalist, had both contributed to its initial
articulation and were to influence its subsequent development.
Given the intellectual gifts of those who contributed to its articulation,
it would be hard, for example, to find the simple advocacy of violence
and war in the ideology of historic Fascism. Whatever rationale for violence one does find in the doctrinal statements of the best of Fascist thinkers is no more immoral than similar vindications found in the works of
Marxists and revolutionaries in general.57 Much the same might be said
of the “irrationality” of Fascist thought. That more “contradictions” are
to be found in Fascist ideology than any other is a claim that defies any
kind of confirmation. Vaguenesses and ambiguities are found everywhere
in the most sophisticated ideological argument. That granted, locating
formal contradictions in those arguments becomes, for all intents and
purposes, logically impossible.
Radiating outward, Fascist doctrine influenced, and was influenced by,
such major intellectuals as Henri De Man. Growing out of the Marxism
of Georges Sorel and the positivism of Vilfredo Pareto, Fascism, as a set
of ideas, was to dominate the European world of ideas for almost three
decades. In effect, to understand something important about the twentieth century is to understand something of the thought of half a dozen
Italian intellectuals who produced the public rationale of Fascism between the time of its first appearance and its extinction in 1945.
However Fascism is judged by history, the movement, the revolution,
and the regime itself had, at their disposal, as talented and moral a cadre
of intellectuals as any found in the ranks of revolutionary Marxism or
traditional liberalism. Those thinkers who fabricated the ideology of Fascism were gifted intellectuals—whose works were as interesting and as
persuasive as any found in the libraries of contemporary revolution. To
trace the development of their ideas is a responsibility of contemporary
political theorists and intellectual historians.
56
Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, p. 229.
See, for example, Sergio Panunzio, Diritto, forza, e violenza: Lineamenti di una teoria
della violenza (Bologna: Licinio Cappelli, 1921), where we find an account of a “theory of
violence.” I have provided a brief account of some of Panunzio’s ideas in A. James Gregor,
“Some Thoughts on State and Rebel Terror,” in David C. Rapoport and Yonah Alexander,
eds., The Rationalization of Terrorism (Frederick, Md.: Aletheia Books, 1982), pp. 56–66.
In this context, one must compare Leon Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1961).
57
CHAPTER TWO
The Historic Background and Enrico Corradini
ONE OF THE presumed distinctions between the left- and right-wing revolutions in the twentieth century has persisted almost to the present. Leftwing revolutions were intuitively anticapitalist; right-wing revolutions
were not—certainly not in the same fashion. More than that, right-wing
revolutions were purportedly “supported,” “underwritten,” “directed,”
and “organized” by “capitalism.”1 Fascism, we have been told as late as
1997, is “implicit in the nature of modernity and capitalism. . . .”2
The argument, fully articulated as early as the middle years of the
1930s,3 identified fascism as a reactive product of industrial capitalism.
The economic depression of the 1930s convinced many that industrial capitalism could no longer realize a rate of profit that might sustain the system.
The consequence, the argument proceeded, was the desperate search by
“finance capitalists” for “reactionary” political instrumentalities that
could effectively resist the inevitable and irreversible catastrophic collapse
of the system. Fascism, according to the argument, provided precisely that
instrumentality. All of which implied that one would expect fascism to
make its appearance exclusively in mature and nonviable industrial economies. Today, given what we know, none of that is, in the least, likely.4
Not only has capitalism not entered into its final crisis anywhere in the
world, but Fascism was first successful in marginally industrialized Italy—
in a nation that had only begun its industrial development. Italian industrial capitalism was hardly at the end of its life cycle. It was at little more
1
There were various characterizations of how “capitalism” was related to “fascism”:
sometimes it was seen as a simple support, sometimes as direct control. Sometimes fascist
dictators were “lackies” and subordinates of “finance capialists,” and sometimes they were
simply “gangsters” who dominated the environment through the indirect connivance of the
capitalists. For a more ample discussion, and specific references to the publications involved
in making the case for Italian Fascism as a “tool” of “finance capitalism,” see A. James
Gregor, Interpretations of Fascism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1997), chap. 5.
2
Mark Neocleous, Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. xi.
3
While variants of the argument appeared as early as the advent of Fascism to power in
Italy, the full, classic expressions are found in Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business
(New York: Pioneer, 1939); and Rajani Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (New
York: International Press, 1934).
4
See the discussion in François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism
in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), chaps. 6 and 7.
H I S T O R I C B AC K G R O U N D
19
than its commencement. Moreover, subsequent movements elsewhere in
Europe that have been characterized as fascist proved to “have been most
successful in mobilizing the lower classes in underdeveloped . . . countries.” Where a variant of fascism—Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism—
arose in an industrialized economy, “most large-scale business and industrial enterprise . . . did not support the Nazis before their seizure of power,
and indeed looked upon them as potential radicals.”5 The fact is that
fascism, in all its variants, had a relationship with industrial capitalism
largely misunderstood by theoreticians. “Modernity”—if it is understood
primarily as industrialization and technological development—was critical to fascism as a revolutionary goal.
In Fascist Italy, economic modernization, industrialization, and technological development were critical to its political enterprise from the very
origins of Mussolini’s movement.6 As a consequence, there were intellectuals, supported by antitraditionalists and Futurists, who sought technological proficiency and economic expansion—formulating programs characterized by “unconditional adherence to logic and reason.”7 Their
reasonings may have been impaired and the programs flawed, but it is
clear that their rationale was as competent as any. Fascism was animated
by a search for rational programs and functional strategies. The exortative enjoinments Fascism employed to mobilize mass energies, to extract
resources, or to ensure popular support were instrumental to the technological modernization and industrialization of Italy—in the effort to create a nation that would assume the economic, political, and military responsibilities of a major power in the modern world. As a consequence,
Fascism was, as will be argued, goal directed and functionally rational.
The principal leaders of Italian Fascism were heretical Marxists precisely in the sense that their experience had taught them that traditional
Marxism offered little guidance in the tortured reality of the first decades
of the twentieth century. Mussolini, an acknowledged Marxist thinker,
had been both the intellectual and political leader of the Italian Socialist
Party prior to the First World War—and collected around himself some
of Italian Marxism’s most competent theoreticians.8 They were the thinkers who early recognized that advanced industrial economies were the
exclusive subject of classical Marxist analyses—economies in which the
5
George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New
York: Howard Fertig, 1999), p. 22 (emphasis supplied); see Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past,
Present, Future (New York: Oxford, 1996), pp. 19, 47–50, 89.
6
See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), chaps. 4 and 5.
7
Mosse, Fascist Revolution, p. 143.
8
See A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).
20
CHAPTER TWO
concentration and centralization of capital, together with its “high organic composition,”9 generated crises that irreversibly reduced their rate
of profit, their viability, and led to “inevitable proletarian revolution.”
They were the thinkers who early understood that revolution in the
retarded economic environments in which they found themselves required
something other than a “proletarian revolution” and a program to more
equitably redistribute the welfare benefits of industrial capitalism. Retrograde industrial development in the twentieth century carried with it consequences that had overwhelming technological and productive, rather
than distributive, implications for all sectors of society.
At the turn of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism in Italy had
only begun its sustained growth. At that time, Italy was a marginally industrialized nation. It took its place among the most economically and
industrially laggard communities of Europe— a fact that rendered Italy a
polity of little consequence among the international powers.10 In those
circumstances, it was very unlikely that “industrial capitalism” would be
in a position to “generate,” foster, or sustain so complex a movement as
Fascism either as an ideology or a revolution. There were precious few
“magnates of industry” or “finance capitalists” with the power and
wherewithal who might create and employ Fascism as a tool to dominate
the national economy.
The entire notion that Fascism was a product of late-industrial or finance capitalism has shown itself to be so improbable that there are few
serious contemporary scholars who entertain it any longer. Italian Fascism was neither the creature nor the tool of “capitalism”—industrial,
financial, or agrarian.11
The Italy that saw the rise of the first Fascism hosted a retrograde industrial capitalism—hardly the agency that possessed the resources or was
infilled with the systemic urgencies that would lead to the creation, sustenance, and organization of a dynamic mass movement capable of controlling a nation for a quarter of a century. At the time of Fascism’s rise,
Italy was largely agrarian, with the bulk of its labor force involved in
9
See the account in A. James Gregor, The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), chaps. 2 and 3.
10
See the account in Bruno Caizzi, Storia dell’industria Italiana (Turin: UTET, 1965), pt.
2, chaps. 2, 3, and 4. See the account of the “Primitivism of the Italian Industrial Environment” at the end of the nineteenth and commencement of the twentieth centuries. Rodolfo
Morandi, Storia della grande industria in Italia (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), pt. 2.
11
Renzo De Felice has reviewed all the available evidence and has dismissed the notion
as unsupported. Other than his multivolume biography of Mussolini in Italian, there are
English texts available that summarize his findings; see Renzo De Felice, Interpretations of
Fascism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977); and Fascism: An Informal Introduction to Its Theory and Practice (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1976), particularly pp.
62–63.
H I S T O R I C B AC K G R O U N D
21
agricultural pursuits.12 Like Russia at the time of the Bolshevik revolution,
the Fascist revolution came to power in Italy just after the nation had
traversed an initial period of preliminary economic and minimal industrial growth, immediately followed by the social and political crises of the
First World War.
In both environments, the revolutionaries received financial and political support from whatever economic, and financial leaders were available
in their respective communities.13 Bolsheviks no more solicited funds nor
recruited exclusively from the proletariat than Fascism did from capitalists. In both environments, monied elements contributed to their respective enterprise, and the revolutionaries in both Russia and Italy enjoyed
the intellectual and political support of a significant number of important
thinkers of all classes. In both instances, some of those same thinkers
were to supply the rationale for the revolution and subsequent regime
developments.
For Fascist intellectuals, even before the March on Rome that brought
Mussolini to power in Italy in 1922, in the retarded economic and industrial development in which they found themselves, Marxism, in whatever
variant, was totally irrelevant. Fascist theoreticians provided an alternative.
That Fascism provided a political, economic, and revolutionary strategy for a less-developed nation grew out of the intellectual and political
environment Fascists inherited from a long history. The proposed alternative assumed specific form almost immediately upon Fascism’s accession
to power in Italy. It was the evolutionary product of a long development
of Italian socialism and nationalism—political convictions that were to
pass almost unaltered into the regime rationale of Fascism.14
The rationale offered by Fascism grew out of a protracted history of
political and national development on the Italian peninsula. Until the nineteenth century Italy was not a nation; it was a congeries of principalities,
city-states, and geographic enclaves more often than not invaded, and ruled
over, by foreigners. As early as 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli had called for the
creation of a united community on the peninsula. He exhorted the people of
the broken nation to “deliver Italy from foreign powers.” He held that
Italy, as a nation, had been reduced to slavery. He went on to argue that
perhaps it was inevitable, given the nature of the world, that such humilia12
See the discussions in the collection edited by Alberto Caracciolo, ed., La formazione
dell’Italia industriale (Rome: Laterza, 1977).
13
See the account in Marcello Lucini, Chi finanziò la rivoluzione d’ottobre? (Rome: Editrice Italiana, 1967).
14
See Alexander J. DeGrand, The Italian Nationalist Association and the Rise of Fascism
in Italy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), pp. 48–49; Nazareno Mezzetti, Alfredo Rocco nel dottrina e nel diritto della rivoluzione fascista (Rome: Pinciana, 1930), pp.
42–43.
22
CHAPTER TWO
tion was necessary in order to foster rebirth—to awaken the interests and
kindle the energy of so demeaned a people. Italy, he averred, had been
reduced to so miserable a condition that Italians were “greater slaves than
the Israelites, more oppressed than the Persians, and still more dispersed
than the Athenians. . . . In a word, [Italians were] without laws and without
chiefs, pillaged, torn to pieces, and enslaved by foreign powers.”15
The theme of Italian inferiority, exploitation, and humiliation is a recurrent feature of Italian literature throughout the years between Machiavelli
and the turn of the twentieth century. After 1530, it was said, “Venice
endures, but does not live; Florence lives, but does not create; Rome governs, but does not reign; Naples reigns, but does not govern; Turin both
reigns and governs, but only obscurely.”16 In 1614, Alessandro Tassoni
sought to reprove Italians for enduring the pretense of others—to continue to allow themselves to be “downtrodden by the arrogance and conceit of foreign peoples.”17
Characteristic of these circumstances is the reaction that inevitably follows. Cognizant of the wretched state of the peninsula, Giambattista Vico
offered Italians heart. At the onset of the eighteenth century, Vico claimed
to have divined, through his “new science,” that peoples and nations went
through “natural” cycles. After the glories of its youth in antiquity, he
maintained, Italy had fallen into senescence and decay. The old Italy had
died. A new Italy, his “science” proclaimed, was destined for rebirth and
resurgence. He anticipated a nation freed of foreign intervention, “master
of itself, great among the great nations of Europe, . . . conscious of its
dignity, proud of its glory, . . . capable of the most splendid arts and original science. . . .”18 His was a full expression of reactive nationalism—a
cry of redemptive desire made by a people, once proud, shorn of selfesteem and collective purpose.
For all the expectations aroused by Vico’s message, at the end of the
same century, Vittorio Alfieri could still speak of Italy as that “August
Matron,” who for so long had been the “principal seat of all human wisdom and values,” and who yet found herself, in his own time, “disarmed,
divided, despised [and] enslaved.”19 With the advent of the nineteenth
15
Niccolo Machiavelli, The History of Florence and The Prince (London: George Bell
and Sons, 1891), p. 484 (chap. 26 of The Prince).
16
Alfredo Oriani, La lotta politica in Italia: Origini della lotta attuale 476/1887 (Rocca
San Casciano: Cappelli, 1956), p. 106.
17
Alessandro Tassoni, “Filippiche contro gli spagnuoli,” Prose politiche e morali (Bari:
Laterza, 1930), pp. 341–42.
18
Giovanni Gentile, Giambattista Vico (Florence: Sansoni, 1936), p. 5; see Gentile, Studi
Vichiani (Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1927).
19
As cited in Ronald S. Cunsolo, Italian Nationalism (Malabar, Fl.: Robert E. Krieger,
1990), p. 184.
H I S T O R I C B AC K G R O U N D
23
century, entire strata of the Italian political and intellectual elite were astir
with the reactive nationalist demands of unification and regeneration.
If anything, the reactive nationalist sentiments of many had become
still more exacerbated. Vincenzo Gioberti spoke of the “primacy” of Italy,
of the superiority of Italians in almost every endeavor. His book on the
moral and civil primacy of Italians (Del primato morale e civile degli italiani) of 1843, however hyperbolic, gave expression to the desire for the
restoration of the nation’s lost grandeur. The mere literary statement,
however, was of little consolation to those who longed for the restoration
of Italy’s one-time glory. At almost the same time, Giacomo Leopardi
lamented the “pitiful condition” of the nation, divested of glory, “sad and
abandoned,” still so disheartened that she was compelled to “conceal her
face” from the world.20
With the coming of the nineteenth century, Europe embarked on a protracted period of political instability. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic period had unleashed forces no longer to be contained. Nationalism, everywhere, became the inspiration for sustained revolutionary
efforts on the part of communities that aspired to nationhood, or which,
like Italy, sought not only political reunification, but national resurgence
as well.
Italy’s Risorgimento, its effort at reunification and rebirth, made the
name of Giuseppe Mazzini familiar to Western thought— however uninterested Westerners might have been in developments on the Italian peninsula. Mazzini spoke, with passion, of an Italian rebirth. He spoke of a
reunited Italy that would represent a redemptive “Third Rome,” to bring
a new message of civilization and morality to a world that had become
increasingly materialistic and devoid of purpose. He spoke of the “great
memories” of a past that would inspire a new Italy to a “new mission.”
He called for an anti-individualistic unity of all Italians at home and a
new development of civilization, inspired by Italy, abroad—the “vast ambition of a nation, intoxicated by its independence of the foreigner, [and]
founded by its own strength.”
That strength of the anticipated new Italy would be mobilized by a
“government that [would] be the mind of a nation, the people its arm,
and the educated and free individual its prophet of future progress. The
first will point out the path that leads to the ideal, its national idea, which
. . . is the only thing that makes a nation.” For Mazzini, the nation was
to be “something more than an aggregation of individuals born to produce and consume corn, the foundations of its life are, fraternity of faith,
consciousness of a common ideal, and the association of all faculties to
work in harmony and with success towards that ideal . . . [with] duty the
20
Giacomo Leopardi, Opere (Milan: Communità, 1937), 1, pp. 137–38.
24
CHAPTER TWO
sole standard of life [and] self-sacrifice . . . the only pure virtue, holy and
mighty in power, the noblest jewel that crowns and hallows the human
soul. . . . People and government must proceed united, like thought and
action in individuals, towards the accomplishment of [their] mission.”
Mazzini sought the nation’s redemptive renewal in what he identified as
a “National Italian Revolution.”21
Similar themes recur in the literature of Italy’s Risorgimento —often in
different combinations and with different emphases. There were those
who, after the founding of the Kingdom in March 1861 and the establishment of Rome as its capital in October 1870, devoted themselves to sustaining and fostering the strength of the new state; others were to attempt
to serve the needs and wants of the new nation’s working classes. The
first were identified as of the right and the others as of the left. There were
those who sought the complete separation of the state and the Roman
Catholic Church—while others sought their collaboration in the creation
of a strong and independent nation.
By the end of the nineteenth century, with the first impressive developments by Italy’s liberal government that signaled the beginnings of a national industrial base, there were those Italians who sought infant industry protection through tariff and nontariff means. Others appealed to the
injunctions of Adam Smith on “free trade” in order to foster the anticipated industrial development. To that purpose, some sought state intervention; others rejected it. In 1892–93, in what could only be the premature response to the first appearance of medium-sized industry on the
peninsula, the first organized socialist elements appeared, inspired by the
Marxism of France and Germany. During that year, the Italian Socialist
party was founded. For Italian Marxism, socialism sought not national
ideals, but social revolution. The revolution it sought had nothing to do
with the creation of a “Third Rome,” but with worldwide “proletarian
revolution.”
With the expansion of suffrage, the opposing political forces in Italy,
marshaled in a variety of relatively small organizations, influenced an indecisive government inextricably caught up in internal conflict. In a Europe alive with energy—the explosive expansion of British, French, and
Belgian imperialism, together with the rapid industrialization of Germany—a newly reunited Italy continued to languish in manifest political,
cultural, industrial, military, and imperial inferiority.22
21
Giuseppe Mazzini, “To the Italians: The Program of the ‘Roma del popolo,’ (1871),”
in The Duties of Man and Other Essays (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1907), pp. 222, 224, 228,
229, 231–32, 234, 238, 240.
22
See the comments in Oriani, La lotta politica in Italia, bk. 9, chapter 3.
H I S T O R I C B AC K G R O U N D
25
It was in that atmosphere of failed political purpose that a modern
Italian nationalism began to take shape. Rather than a single Italian nationalism, there were at that time “many nationalisms,” each distinctive
in its own fashion.23 Some expressions had been precipitated by Italy’s
defeat in Ethiopia in 1896—its first real venture into colonialism. Others
were the product of the humiliation produced by the awareness that millions of Italians had been forced by poverty to emigrate to other lands in
the search for survival—there to serve foreign masters. Some were influenced by the “cultural imperialism” that had Italians submissively adopt
foreign customs and mannerisms—which, in turn, generated that entire
lack of moral cohesion without which Italians slipped into servility and
bondage to others.
Some time within the first decade of the twentieth century, all its differences notwithstanding, Italian nationalism began to assume a specific
configuration. Without question, one of those who were to mold emergent Italian nationalism was Enrico Corradini—born on 20 July 1865 in
the town of Samminiatello di Montelupo near Florence. While still a student, Corradini embarked on a career as a writer—the author of a number
of works more literary than political—but by 1902, he was giving expression to an uncertain, if passionate, nationalism that still lacked doctrinal
coherence.24
In 1903, Corradini founded Il Regno, a journal that only briefly endured—characterized by major disagreements among the authors contributing to its pages. It was a journal that, in its own words, was more or
less devoted to the moral regeneration of a new nation afflicted with all
the disabilities of decadence: anarchism and antinomianism, narcissism
and servility. Italy suffered venality and incompetence—suffused with a
“putrid decrepitude”—manifest not only in the behaviors of a socialism
that would destroy the nation through class conflict, but also in the behaviors of the “Italian bourgeoisie” that while it “ruled and governed,” was
apparently prepared to “bring to earth all the high values of humankind
and the nation.”25
In that same year, Giuseppe Prezzolini and Giovanni Papini, who had
collaborated with Corradini in the founding of Il Regno, founded Leonardo, a political journal welcomed by Corradini as another voice devoted to “restoring to Italy its consciousness as a great nation”—a consciousness necessary not only for the “prosperity and dignity of the
23
See Gioacchino Volpe, Italia moderna 1910/1914 (Florence: Sansoni, 1973), pp.
274–313.
24
See the relatively extensive discussion of Corradini’s literary works in Giacomo Pavoni,
Enrico Corradini nella vita nazionale e nel giornalismo (Rome: Pinciana, n.d.).
25
Ibid., pp. 36 and 37.
26
CHAPTER TWO
fatherland, but for that of the working class as well.”26 These were generic
themes—supported at that time by notables such as Benedetto Croce—
that were to remain central to Italian nationalism as it matured in the
conferences and through the journals so abundant throughout the first
two decades of the twentieth century.
Commencing in December 1908, Prezzolini edited La Voce, a journal
of ideas that sought to bring together various groups and individuals committed to “the renewal of Italy, . . . to the creation of a new environment
of truth, of sincerity, and of realism—to study the problems of the new
generation.”27 In the discussions, conferences, polemics, and exchanges
that followed, Italian nationalism began to take on the character of a
political movement.
It had already become evident that nationalists of all varieties sought
the rapid economic development of the peninsula.28 That was the necessary condition for Italy’s resumption of its proper place in the community
of nations. In a discourse delivered in 1904, and subsequently elaborated
upon, Papini identified three stages in the evolution of Italian nationalism:
the first, from Dante to Leopardi was almost exclusively poetic; the second, from Gioberti to Mazzini was philosophical; and the third—that
which had begun with the then-new century—was economic.29
What the new nationalism—the nationalism of rapid industrial development—required was a transformation of the psychology of Italians. No
longer were Italians to be talkers, the spinners of phrases. They were to
become serious, passionately devoted to performance. They were to develop a proper sense of time—like the industrial English and the industrializing Germans. To the exclusion of fine phrases that have as their referent a vague and misty humanism, Italians were to recognize in the nation
that organic reality in which all interests, material and moral, were
rooted. For Papini, neither the “proletariat” nor the “bourgeoisie” represented self-sufficient entities that could survive or prosper without the
other. The working classes and the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie were all
united in the concrete actuality of the historic nation—for which they
must be prepared to sacrifice immediate for more substantial, more enduring, more profound, and more ethical future benefits.
26
As cited in Piero Buscaroli, “Introduction,” in Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, Vecchio e nuovo nazionalismo (1914; reprint, Rome: Volpe, 1967), p. 2.
27
Giuseppe Prezzolini, L’Italiano inutile (Florence: Vallecchi, 1964), p. 155.
28
Corradini had spoken of the necessity of industrializing the peninsula in his novels; see
the discussion in Pavoni, Enrico Corradini, pp. 76–77.
29
Giovanni Papini, “L’Italia rinasce,” in Papini and Prezzolini, Vecchio e nuovo nazionalismo, pp. 125–31; see the account in Paola Maria Arcari, Le elaborazioni della dottrina
politica nazionale fra l’unità e l’intervento (1870–1914) (Florence: Marzocco, 1934–39),
vol. 1, chap. 2.
H I S T O R I C B AC K G R O U N D
27
Because the tasks faced by the new nation would be so onerous and
demanding, they required a committed and heroic minority prepared to
assume responsibility. Papini reminded his audience that everything
known concerning the political life of humankind indicated that everwhere and throughout time, minorities have effectively ruled. Gaetano
Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto had made the case. For all the grand words
of democratic theory, only aristocracies, of one sort or another, govern
communities. The distinction is not between democratic and aristocratic
rule; it is between the rule of incompetents and brigands and an epistemocracy—rule by those who are informed and competent.
In a resurgent Italy, Papini argued, it would be an aristocracy that
would address the problems of forced emigration by its citizens. In such
an Italy, it would be a leadership that understood that the nation lacked
both domestic capital and essential raw materials for industrial development. Whatever the natural obstacles, however, that leadership would
create a government that would accelerate the creation of an industrial
base adequate to support the geographic, cultural, economic, and political
expansion of a regenerate nation.30
These were the essentials of the new Italian nationalism that began to
take shape between the turn of the new century and 1913. It was a doctrinal nationalism that gradually emerged primarily, but not exclusively,
out of the thought of Enrico Corradini. As early as 1902, he had given
expression to the sociological premises that he understood to be the intellectual foundations of his nationalism. He had argued that all the studies
of animal and human behavior supported the empirical claim that virtually all communities composed of sentient creatures are structured by a
sentiment of in-group amity and out-group enmity—and that wherever it
was found that a community was no longer informed by such sentiments,
that community was decadent—veritably moribund. Any community that
had lost its sense of unity, that was riven by internal conflict, Corradini
maintained, was threatened with extinction. As a consequence, he was
prepared to argue that the Marxist insistence on “class struggle” within
communities heralded not liberating revolution, but threatened such communities with dissolution. Corradini understood domestic class struggle
as symptomatic of imminent extinction.31
Corradini argued that everything we know of group dynamics indicated that the sense of community that sustained the nation was a product
of geography, of enduring interaction over time, and an abiding sense of
30
See Papini, “Un programma nazionalista,” in Papini and Prezzolini, Vecchio e nuovo
nazionalismo, pp. 1–36.
31
Enrico Corradini, “Le opinioni degli uomini e i fatti dell’uomo,” Discorsi politici
(1902–1923) (Florence: Vallecchi, 1923, hereafter DP), pp. 24–25.
28
CHAPTER TWO
similarity—in language, art, politics, and collective enterprise—sustained
through sympathy, mimicry, and instruction. A nation was an association
of “similars” united in a consciousness of a collective mission.32 It was
“the maximum unity of the maximum number of similars,” at any given
historic period, pursuing a collective goal that promised the fulfillment of
deeply felt communal needs.
Such a community of similars was vital as long as it was animated by
a sense of mission, a “faith and an obedience . . . to a task to complete,
to a destiny as yet uncertain.”33 This was as true for tribes, clans, federations, city-states, and empires as it was for modern nations.34 The nationalism of Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century, Corradini argued,
was an expression of that universal faith and that general psychological
disposition to obey, to sacrifice, and to commit oneself to the fulfillment
of a collective mission that was a function of the individual’s involvement
in an historic “community of destiny.”35
It was obvious that the unity implied in such convictions would make
both the pure “proletarianism” and the class struggle advocated by Italian
Marxists, at that time, manifestly dysfunctional in terms of the nation’s
future. Given those assessments, Corradini, by 1909, felt compelled to
address the complex and emotional issue of the role that any form of
socialism might play in the nationalist resurgence of Italy. Socialism, with
the advent of mass politics, had become a critical issue.
In December 1909,36 Corradini outlined the elements of a kind of Italian syndicalism that he conceived might be fully compatible with the nationalism for which he had become spokesman. As distinct from the reformist socialism of the Italian Socialist Party, Corradini occupied himself
with the antitraditional revolutionary socialism of Italian syndicalism—
as it articulated itself under the influence of French revolutionaries. Many
features of Italian syndicalism attracted Corradini. First of all, syndicalism gave expression to the exacerbated moralism of Georges Sorel.37
Corradini early found himself opposed to the “positivism” that had
settled down on Italian thought by the turn of the century. That positivism
32
See the discussion in Corradini, L’unità e la potenza delle nazioni (Florence: Valecchi,
1922), pp. 61–62.
33
Corradini, “La vita nazionale,” in DP, pp. 36–40.
34
See the discussion in Corradini, L’ombra della vita (Naples: Ricciardi, 1908), pp. 281,
285–87.
35
Corradini, “Le nazioni proletarie e il nazionalismo,” in DP, pp. 113–18.
36
Corradini, “Sindacalismo, nazionalismo, imperialismo,” in DP, pp. 53–69.
37
See Emile Pouget, Les Bases du Syndicalisme (Paris: L’Emancipatrice, n.d.); Arturo
Labriola, “Le Syndicalisme et le Socialisme en Italie,” in Syndicalisme et Socialisme (Paris:
Marcel Rivière, 1908); Emile Pouget, Le Syndicat (Paris: L’Emancipatrice, n.d.); Georges
Guy-Grand, La Philosophie Syndicaliste (Paris: Grasset, 1911); Louis Levine, Syndicalism
in France (New York: Columbia University, 1914).
H I S T O R I C B AC K G R O U N D
29
was a form of scientism that conceived all issues subject to scientific resolution.38 What the positivists considered “metaphysics”—moral inquiry,
theology, any speculation on philosophical “meaning”—was dismissed as
simple nonsense. Religion was disparaged as the preoccupation of old
women—and philosophical speculation was considered nothing more
than reflections on empty concerns.39
Corradini saw the “traditional” Marxism of the orthodox socialists—
with its economic determinism and its “dialectical materialism”—as representative of the then-prevalent and objectionable scientism. For orthodox Marxists, moral concerns and philosophical principles were simply
derivatives of the “earthy” economic base of contemporary society. They
allowed little space for the influence of moral or intellectual factors.
Corradini, like the syndicalists of his time, was convinced that moral
sentiments and philosophical convictions animated the vast majority of
political actors—and served a critical function in the progression of historic events. To attempt to reduce those sentiments and convictions to the
derivative effect of economic determinants was to misunderstand the very
nature of human beings as well as history itself. Corradini held that
human beings are disposed to give themselves over to causes that make
their lives worthwhile—causes that found expression in what Sorel identified as “myths.”40
“Myths,” for Corradini and the syndicalists, were not untruths. They
were broad anticipations of a chosen future—a vision for which human
beings were prepared to sacrifice, for which they were prepared to labor,
and for which, if necessary, they were prepared to die.41 They were understood to be critical motivating elements in the mobilization of “masses,”
a mobilization necessary for the realization of political purpose.
It was within that conception of political reality that both nationalists
and syndicalists devoted their intellectual energies in assessing the character of the psychology of crowds: how assemblies were mobilized and how
their belief systems were influenced. Within the first decade of the twentieth century, both nationalists and syndicalists sought to understand the
psychology of associated life.
Revolutionary syndicalists like A. O. Olivetti and Paolo Orano both
published substantial works on the psychology of crowds during the first
38
See, for example, E. Troilo, Idee e ideali del positivismo (Rome: Voghera, 1909).
See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 2001), chaps. 1 and 2.
40
See the discussion in Corradini, L’unità e la potenza delle nazioni (Florence: Vallecchi,
1922), pp. 37–40.
41
For a more ample account of the role of “myth” and the mobilization of “masses,” see
A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York:
Free Press, 1969), pp. 46–71.
39
30
CHAPTER TWO
years of the century. They undertook inquiries into the nature of the psychology of life lived in common, and how collective psychology might be
influenced by meneurs—leaders.42 Scipio Sighele, one of the intellectual
leaders of the nationalists at that time, had similarly produced substantial
works devoted to the same issues.43
Both syndicalists and nationalists recognized that collective psychology
informed political behavior. Both sought to understand the processes involved. Traditional Marxism had not provided an account of how revolutions proceeded—how masses were moved to revolutionary enterprise.
Marxism had not spoken of the role of leaders in the mobilization of
masses. It did not address itself to the role of “great men,” the “heroes” of
history—and what factors entered into their program of historic change.
Conversely, syndicalists and nationalists sought to engineer revolution
by invoking the sentiments of humans living in association. Both acknowledged that the task involved understanding problems that animated humans as group animals. What both syndicalists and nationalists sought
to understand was the nature and the scope of influence excercized by
suggestion and imitation among similars living a life in common—what
externalities influenced political actors. They tried to appreciate the role
of those externalities, the regularities governing the psychology of masses,
and the educative role of “heroes” in history. They understood the processes as falling somewhere between the conceptions of Herbert Spencer
and Ralph Waldo Emerson.44
In effect, there were many intellectual affinities that reduced the political distance between the nationalists and the revolutionary syndicalists at
the turn of the twentieth century. Corradini argued that everything indicated that the distance between the right and the left could be negotiated.
Their affinities were clear.
It was within that context, by 1910,45 that Corradini was prepared to
applaud the antidemocratic and antiparliamentarian predispositions of
the radical Marxist syndicalists. Like the syndicalists, Corradini saw parliamentarianism as an institution designed to frustrate the accomplishment of great tasks—to corrupt the political consciousness of masses. In
parliamentary systems, he argued, parties and factions served parochial
interests, and used the representative body of the nation as an arena in
which they negotiated their tawdry compromises. Within parliamentary
42
See, for example, A. O. Olivetti, “Il problema della folla,” Nuova Antologia 38, no.
761 (1 September 1903), pp. 281–91; and Paolo Orano, La psicologia sociale (Bari: Laterza,
1902).
43
See Scipio Sighele, La delinquenza settaria (Milan: Treves, 1897), Le scienze sociale
(Milan: Vallardi, 1903); and L’Intelligenza della folla (Turin: Bocca, 1903).
44
Sighele, L’intelligenza della folla, chap. 4, para. 4.
45
Corradini, “Principi di nazionalismo,” in DP, pp. 91–102.
H I S T O R I C B AC K G R O U N D
31
arrangements, none sought to serve the general interests; and none committed themselves to a vision of the nation that would see Italy once again
a great power, a founder of a new civilization.
Syndicalists similarly opposed parliamentarianism with all its venality
and narrow interests.46 They sought a revolutionary resolution of the
problems that beset their times. Like nationalists, the revolutionary syndicalists understood the nature of politics and the mobilization of masses
in terms of the psychology of associated human life. They understood that
any historic mission assumed by a collectivity of human beings would
have to be supported by an infrangible integrity. The mission of the syndicalists was to discharge the tasks of the “revolution” to which they had
committed themselves. The mission of the nationalists was to realize the
redemption and rebirth of the historic and millennial Italian nation.
Both movements conceived themselves seeking the fullness of equity
and justice. They understood that only through a proletarian or a national
revolution might that equity and justice be attained. Revolutionary syndicalists understood that the syndicates, as “communities of destiny,” incorporated in themselves that unity of similars essential to the fulfillment of
a collective mission—just as nationalists identified the political nationstate as the requisite revolutionary association. What syndicalists failed
to appreciate, Corradini argued, was the reality of the function of the
nation in the contemporary world.47
While a firm sense of the unity of similars—the union of laborers in
modern industry—was the foundation of what the syndicalists conceived
as their community, Corradini argued that such a collective, in isolation,
could neither prosper nor survive in the contemporary world. Corradini
argued that as long as there were nations, workers would constitute only
a functional part of an historic and organic whole.48 Any class, in isolation, could not survive in the contemporary world.
In the world at the beginning of the twentieth century, Corradini maintained, only nations could serve as international actors. The world, almost
all nationalists argued, was an arena of Darwinian struggle for survival.
If Italian workers expected to survive and prosper in such a world, they
required entrepreneurs, functionaries, merchants, financiers, intellectuals,
educators, and state officials.49 Once syndicalists understood that, Cor46
See the comments by A. O. Olivetti, “Il sindacalismo: Socialismo e sindacalismo,” in
Battaglie sindacaliste: Dal sindacalismo al fascismo, a typescript collection of Olivetti’s writings of the period provided by the Olivetti family. The selection is found in the first volume,
dated 6 March 1906.
47
See the entire discussion in Corradini, L’Ombra della vita, pp. 285–87.
48
Corradini, “Le nuove dottrine nazionali e il rinnovamento spirituale,” in DP, pp.
200, 203.
49
Corradini, “Nazionalismo e socialismo,” in DP, pp. 214–15, 218–19, 220.
32
CHAPTER TWO
radini concluded, they could only become advocates and practitioners
of a national syndicalism—a revolutionary syndicalism that nationalists
could wholeheartedly support.
Like most “new” nationalists, and revolutionary syndicalists, Corradini anticipated the emergence of a revolutionary elite in Italy—an aristocracy of commitment and competence—that would shepherd the nation
from its status as an international inferior to that of a “great power.” The
revolutionary syndicalists, like the nationalists, sought just such an elite
in their own search for proletarian justice.
Corradini maintained that the syndicalists fully understood the character of intact and vital communities. They understood that only the bonding of similars, united in a mission against opponents, might assure success in external conflict. Syndicalists, like nationalists, appreciated the fact
that vital communities were invariably led by effective elites—an aristocracy of purpose—capable of transforming the psychology of masses.50
More than that, syndicalists, like nationalists, sought justice in a world
in which injustice was all but universal.
The political aristocracy anticipated by the syndicalists was an aristocracy that would lead the working-class movement to victory against a complacent and ineffectual ruling class—an effete ruling class no longer possessed of the qualities of leadership. Corradini argued that the syndicalists
were essentially correct in their assessment of the Italian political scene.
Italy required an elite of strength, competence, and courage. Such an
elite was not to be found among the orthodox Marxists of the Italian Socialist party. It was not to be found among the established Italian middle
class. What was required was a new political class, an elite that would
assume control of the peninsula through a “rotation of elites.” Such a
rotation, anticipated by Vilfredo Pareto, would bring forward a small minority of persons committed to the creation of a new Italy—a class that
understood accelerated productivity, antidemocratic strength in political
leadership, and an aggressive pursuit of the nation’s interests. It would be
the aristocracy of an emergent Italy. It would be an aristocracy of heroic
demeanor, cognizant of the fact that Italy’s late development would require
sacrifice, discipline, and enterprise of almost preternatural character.51
Given such a conception of the environment in which both syndicalists
and nationalists were obliged to operate, syndicalists had no more sympathy for parliamentary compromise and incompetence than had the nationalists. Both sought elites that would accomplish great things, without
compromise and without negotiation, committed to goals that would
shape the modern world. Syndicalists sought revolution by Italy’s workers
50
51
See the discussion in Corradini, Il volere d’Italia (Naples: Perrella, 1911), pp. 161–65.
Corradini, “Le nazioni proletarie e il nazionalismo,” in DP, pp. 113–18.
H I S T O R I C B AC K G R O U N D
33
in the service of world proletarian revolution. Corradini sought a revolution by all Italians in the service of Italy as a “proletarian nation.”52
Corradini argued that “proletarianism” had some singular merits in
the Italian environment. He reminded the domestic leaders of the proletariat that for a quarter of a century Italian workers had been forced to leave
their homeland to work in lands more prosperous—“capitalist” lands.
Emigrant Italian workers throughout the advanced industrial nations
were compelled to submit to the overlordship of foreign capitalists in
order to simply survive.53
Corradini suggested that the distinctions that the syndicalists recognized within Italy were much more emphatic outside of Italy. If domestic
capitalists were seen as oppressors, they were of negligible consequence
compared to the world dominance of the capitalists of the advanced industrial nations. The advanced capitalist nations maintained an abiding
and exacting control over an impoverished “proletarian” Italy. Even if a
proletarian class revolution overthrew Italy’s impoverished bourgeoisie,
Italy itself would remain a proletarian nation subject to the dominance
of foreign “plutocracies.”
Corradini anticipated that thinking syndicalists would inevitably recognize the reality of the modern world. Syndicalism, with its call to discipline, sacrifice, and heroism, could only eventually become a national
syndicalism and become a collateral support for revolutionary nationalism. Corradini, as early as 1909–11, anticipated an ultimate coming together of both revolutionary movements.
Given these notions, Corradini went further. He suggested that the entire conception of “class warfare,” advocated by revolutionary syndicalists, had an appropriate referent in the modern world—not a counterproductive warfare between elements of the same nation—but a warfare of
“proletarian nations” against the “plutocracies.”54 Corradini argued that
emergent nations, those characterized by delayed industrial development—proletarian nations—found themselves victims of those nations
that had already acceded to the level of advanced industrialization—plutocratic nations. Those nations suffering delayed industrial development
found themselves subject to the impostures of those more advanced.
Corradini maintained that all the trade and financial infrastructure of
the modern world was controlled by the plutocracies. The result was the
threat of perpetual inferiority for those proletarian nations that were late
52
Corradini, Il volere d’Italia, pp. 205–7.
See the discussion in Corradini’s La patria lontana (Milan: Treves, 1910); and the commentary in Pavoni, Enrico Corradini nella vita nazionale e nel giornalismo, pp. 47–66.
54
Pavoni, Enrico Corradini, pp. 93, 100, “Le nazioni proletarie e il nazionalism,” in DP,
pp. 104–18; and “Nazionalismo e democrazia,” in DP, p. 161.
53
34
CHAPTER TWO
in achieving industrial development.55 Almost from the very commencement of his political activity, Corradini had insisted on the distinction
between “proletarian” and “plutocratic” nations.56
Corradini contended that, given those conditions, the less developed
nations were condemned to a threat of perpetual dependency on the plutocracies.57 England would forever command the seas and the financial
markets—and France would dominate the Continent with its culture and
its armed forces. Italy, capital and resource deficient,58 would subsist on
the sufferance of wealthy nations. It would remain forever an economic
and cultural colony of its “superiors.” “Rich nations” would forever
dominate “proletarian Italy.”
For Corradini, success in the international class war he anticipated required a readiness to sacrifice on the part of Italians—part of the world’s
proletariat—a readiness to commit themselves to disciplined struggle
against their oppressors. Italians must be prepared, he argued, to assume
the qualities of a “soldier-producer”—a readiness to die for their commitments and an equal readiness to undertake protracted sacrificial labor in
order to fashion the material base for the resurgent nation.59
By 1910, Italian nationalism had organized itself in the Associazione
nationalista italiano (ANI), an association of like-minded intellectuals
who saw Italy’s salvation in rapid industrial and economic development—a development that would insulate it from the exactions of the
plutocracies: economic exploitation, cultural “imperialism,” and military
subordination.60 A “revitalized” entrepreneurial class was understood as
necessary to provide the antecedent essential to a nation in the process
of rebirth.
The argument was that the industrial development of Italy was the “historic task” of the nation’s entrepreneurial middle class—a class that had,
throughout the years of the Risorgimento, failed its mission. For the nationalists, a reawakening of the sense of responsibility among the bourgeoisie was essential to the fulfillment of the tasks of Italy’s Risorgimento.
Together with a political aristocracy conscious of the regenerative tasks
that faced the nation, Italy required an industrial middle class capable of
discharging the economic responsibilities of the new age.61 As preconditions, those responsibilities would necessitate the intregration of all pro55
See Corradini, “Nazionalismo e socialismo,” in DP, pp. 217, 218, 222, 227.
See Pavoni, Enrico Corradini, pp. 110–11.
57
Corradini, “Le nazioni proletarie e il nazionalism,” in DP, p. 109.
58
Corradini, L’Ora di Tripoli (Milan: Treves, 1911), pp. 239–41.
59
Corradini, “La morale della guerra,” in DP, pp. 141–42, 149.
60
Arcari, Le elaborazioni della dottrina politica nazionale, vol. 2, pp. 404–77.
61
See the entire discussion in Vincenzo Amoruso, Il sindacalismo di Enrico Corradini
(Palermo: Società Editrice Orazio Fiorenza, 1929), pp. 99–140.
56
H I S T O R I C B AC K G R O U N D
35
ductive elements in a juridical national union in which workers’ organizations would be provided legal recognition on a par with the organizations
of entrepreneurs. Labor disputes would be resolved—to the exclusion of
work stoppages—through arbitration that would recognize the ultimate
unity of interests between labor and capital enterprise.
What Corradini alluded to was a sort of “corporativism” in which the
productive elements of modern society would be politically organized
under the aegis of the state. The goal was the restoration of Italy to the
ranks of the “great powers.” That could be accomplished only by uniting
the energies of the nation’s working classes and its entrepreneurs together
with the authority of the state.
By 1910, Italian nationalism had taken on almost all the characteristics
that would follow it into Fascism. Mario Viana had founded the journal
Tricolore, in Turin, a publication that advocated the fusion of revolutionary syndicalism and nationalism. Paolo Orano had assumed the responsibilities of editing the journal La Lupa62 and sought the union of syndicalism and nationalism in some form of national syndicalism.
The first nationalist congress opened in Florence on 4 December 1910.
While Scipio Sighele was chosen president, in retrospect it is clear that
Corradini dominated the proceedings. It was he who argued that the only
revolutionary movements in retrograde Italy were the nationalists and the
revolutionary syndicalists. Syndicalists like A. O. Olivetti, Orano, and
Massimo Rocca acknowledged the affinities shared by the two movements, a fact that heralded their ultimate union.
In 1911, Italy entered into protracted political and diplomatic crises.
The French, British, and Germans devoted much of their international
attention to the Turkish provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica—that
together composed the North African territory of Libya. Italy had negotiated an agreement with France, in 1899, that anticipated that those provinces would become regions of Italian interest. Italian immigrants had
settled in the region, and Italy sought to protect them. After 1905, it was
no longer clear that France would respect Italy’s interests in North Africa.
In July 1911, when France’s accession to control over Morocco was realized, Italy proceeded to move to protect her interests in Tripolitania.
On 30 September 1911, Italy declared war on Turkey. Nationalists
quickly supported the enterprise. The nationalist journal, Idea Nazionale,
advocated war against Turkey in the pursuit of the nation’s interests. With
the declaration of war, many Italians identified themselves with the undertaking. Patriotic sentiment found mass expression with which socialists
and antinationalists were compelled to deal.
62
See Arcari, Dottrina politica nazionale, vol. 3, pp. 96–97.
36
CHAPTER TWO
Even before the war against the Ottoman Empire evoked the spontaneous patriotism that made nationalism an issue, a significant number of
revolutionary syndicalists, including Arturo Labriola, A. O. Olivetti, and
Paolo Orano, had begun to identify backward and impoverished Italy
with a “proletarian” struggle against the established “plutocracies” of
Northern Europe. By 1911, Olivetti alluded to those affinities between
revolutionary syndicalism and nationalism in much the same fashion as
had Corradini.
For Olivetti,63 both syndicalism and nationalism were “modern” and
“intellectually respectable” revolutionary movements, distinguishing
themselves from the “conservatism” of both reform socialism and the
traditional parliamentary politics of the nation. Both were “collectivistic”
in orientation, recognizing that human beings were creatures inextricably
born and shaped in association, animated by the will and leadership of
those sensitive to the historic needs of any given time.
For syndicalists, all that was derivative of the Marxism with which
they had long been familiar and to which they had committed themselves.
Marx had identified the human being as a Gemeinwesen, a “collective
being”—and dismissed the liberal notion of the primacy of individuality
as a counterrevolutionary fiction.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx had spoken of the “theoreticians”
of communism as sharing identical interests with the proletariat, but
seeing farther and with greater clarity. They would constitute a professional intellectual leadership essential to the making of revolution.64 Seizing on that idea, syndicalists argued that without the decisive intervention
of such an elite, the working masses would lapse back into the indolence
of compromise and the venal bargaining of trade unionism.
In that sense, both syndicalists and nationalists acknowledged the role
of communitarianism, will, decisiveness, and leadership in the politics of
the time. Like the nationalists, syndicalists sought an aristocracy of commitment—an intransigent elite—incapable of “adapting” to the compromises required by the parliamentary politics of electoral democracy or
class relations in bourgeois circumstances.
Because of their recognition of the decisive role of will and leadership,
Olivetti continued, syndicalists, like nationalists, spoke with the language
of Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer. They opposed themselves to the vain and unmanly positivism of the turn of the century that
63
The subsequent discussion is taken from A. O. Olivetti, “Sindacalismo e nazionalismo:
Le due realtà del pensiero contemporaneo,” in Pro e contro Tripoli, reproduced in Battaglie
sindacalista (15 February 1911), pp. 60–67.
64
See the account in A. James Gregor, A Survey of Marxism: Problems in Philosophy
and the Theory of History (New York: Random House, 1965), chap. 6.
H I S T O R I C B AC K G R O U N D
37
conceived human life determined by some set of “immutable laws.” Syndicalists, like nationalists, were voluntarists, given to the inescapable influence of spirit and moral conviction in the affairs of humankind.
Like nationalists, Olivetti reminded his readers, syndicalists were animated by moral convictions that allowed little compromise. Like nationalists, syndicalists sought an antibourgeois, antitraditional remaking of
Italy and Italians. They sought to create a nation of “producers” out of
an inert and unresponsive population.
Olivetti argued that what distinguished syndicalists from nationalists
was the fact that whatever nationalism there had been among Italians
was a by-product of the dominance of bourgeois cultural inculcation. He
argued that Italian workers had no fundamental interest in the future of
the nation-state. Their interests were tied to the future of the international
proletarian revolution and all that it implied.
Nonetheless, in the course of the first decade of the twentieth century,
some of the leaders of revolutionary syndicalism transferred their loyalties
from Marxist internationalism to the revolutionary nationalism of Corradini. Roberto Forges Davanzati and Maurizio Maraviglia, subsequently
to become two of the most important political leaders of nationalism,
were recruited at that time. Tommaso Monicelli, who saw the emergence
of themes shared by syndicalists and nationalists as the grounds for collaboration, became one of the intellectual leaders of Corradini’s publication, Idea Nazionale.65
By 1913, Italian nationalism had matured into a coherent, comprehensive, and revolutionary doctrine for a “proletarian Italy” that sought redemption and rebirth in a world of international competition dominated
by hegemonic “plutocratic powers.” It was a doctrine shaped by the influence of some of the most important intellectuals of Europe. References
to the thought of Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Gabriel Tarde,
Georges Sorel, Gustave Le Bon and Ludwig Gumplowicz dotted its pages.
Before the end of the next decade Giovanni Gentile, by that time, one
of the most prominent philosophical thinkers in Europe, was numbered
among its advocates.66
It was in that year that Italian nationalism attracted yet another intellectual who was to influence not only nationalism as a doctrine, but Fascism
as a political regime. In that year Professor Alfredo Rocco abandoned
Marxist socialism and the politics of Italy’s Radical party, to commit himself to nationalism. He brought with him a formidable intellect and a
remarkable sense of politics.
65
De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association and the Rise of Fascism in Italy, p. 21.
See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (New Brunswick,
N.J.: Transaction, 1999), chap. 5; and Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism.
66
CHAPTER THREE
Alfredo Rocco and the Elements
of Fascist Doctrine
THE NATIONALIST congress held in Florence in December 1910 provided
the opportunity for the expression of many of its doctrinal variants.
Many factions made their appearance. There were clear uncertainties
concerning what the relationship of the movement to the Roman Catholic Church was to be, as well as how the movement’s tentative connection
with the radicalism of Italian syndicalism was to be understood. Nonetheless, by the end of the congress a doctrinal statement was put together
by Luigi Valli in which a given set of “principles of nationalism” received
expression.1
In providing his account, Valli followed the directive insights of Enrico
Corradini. He correspondingly distinguished Italian nationalism from the
sentiment of generic Italian patriotism—by defining the former as a substantive doctrine committing its followers to a set of relatively specific
political behaviors.2 First and foremost, it was maintained, nationalists
were sociologically collectivists—seeing the survival and destiny of individuals fundamentally governed by their multifaceted involvement in
community. Nationalists were to argue that in the contemporary world,
that privileged community in which individuals found security and succor
was the nation.
In terms of the social theory of nationalism, its advocates were neither
exclusively “primordialists” nor “instrumentalists.”3 They neither held
nationalist sentiment to be simply primordial, nor did they conceive it
to be learned behavior or the consequence of psychological manipulation
by elites.
1
See the ample discussion in Paola Maria Arcari, Le elaborazioni della dottrina politica
nazionale fra l’unità e l’intervento (1870–1914) (Florence: Marzocco, 1934–39), vol. 2, pp.
606–48.
2
The following account follows the text in Luigi Valli, “Che cosa è e che cosa vuole il
nazionalismo,” in Francesco Perfetti, ed., Il nazionalismo italiano (Rome: Il Borghese,
1969), pp. 37–58.
3
Concerning the “primordialist” and “instrumentalist” schools of thought as interpretative strategies in explaining nationalism, see Crawford Young, “The Temple of Ethnicity,”
World Politics 35, no. 4 (July 1983), pp. 652–62.
E L E M E N T S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
39
As has been suggested, Corradini held that collectivist sentiment among
human beings was the product of a psychological predisposition that was
itself a function of a “primordialist” evolutionary selection. Corradini
argued that throughout evolutionary history, individuals inclined to identify with an intact community enjoyed greater survival potential than
those who lived solitary lives exposed to the threat of all. The consequence
was that human beings, early in evolutionary history, were preselected to
identify with an association of similars—to find comfort in their presence
and discomfort in their absence.
Such innate dispositions, the argument continued, found expression in
a variety of fashions—influenced by surrounding external conditions and
given instrumental specificity by meneurs—those capable of articulating
emotional and reasoned arguments supporting the identification of the
individual with one or another specific “community of destiny.” Nationalists thus argued that the disposition to identify with a community could
find expression in a variety of forms.
Nationalists, as has been suggested, recognized the same psychological
dispositions among the revolutionary syndicalists of their time—those
who argued for the identification of individuals with their class associations. The sense of group identity could, under appropriate circumstances, be transferred to an alternative community. Nationalists were
prepared to recognize in the syndicalist advocacy of identification with
their cohorts in labor a legitimate expression of psychological collectivism. Nationalists were ready to admit that under a different set of historic
circumstances, those same individuals might identify with their tribe, confederation, city-state, or political league.4
Given all that, Valli maintained that because of the historic, economic,
political, and military realities of the twentieth century, the nation was
the only agency that could successfully harbor, protect, and foster the
well-being of individuals and groups of individuals. In an international
environment of constant competition—economic, military, and demographic—the nation, as the privileged community, must be forever prepared to struggle for survival, security, and place.
Success in that struggle required several necessary conditions: (1) an
effective material base—an extensive and intensively developed industrial
foundation; that, to survive and expand, required (2) state support
4
There are a variety of expressions of very similar analyses among contemporary thinkers; see particularly Arthur Keith, A New Theory of Human Evolution (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949); John A. Armstrong, National before Nationalism (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Balckwell, 1986); in this context see Alfredo Rocco’s comments in “L’ora
del nazionalismo,” in Scritti e discorsi politici (Milan: Giuffre, 1938. Hereafter cited as
SDP), 2, pp. 507–8.
40
CHAPTER THREE
through tariff protection for infant industries and subventions for the development of a merchant fleet capable of assuring the expansion of domestic industry through the acquisition of foreign market share. That
would begin to provide the wherewithal for (3) a competent and effective
military that would allow for (4) the power projection capabilities of a
strong, goal-directed, and integral state that, mobilizing all the forces of
the nation, would navigate the perils of an extremely dangerous international environment. The state would be “integral” in the sense that all the
vital elements of the nation, without prejudice, would be therein seamlessly incorporated.
In such an environment, one would have to be forever prepared for
conflict. Such conflict might reveal itself in economic, cultural, or military
competition. The nation must be prepared to enter the lists, struggle and
prevail in each and every contest. In that respect, Italian nationalists held
that their newly reunited nation was fundamentally ill-prepared for survival in the twentieth century.
Italians, it was argued, suffered a flawed national consciousness. The
nation was “weak and inert.”5 The schools, where it might be expected that
citizens were to be trained in civil and military discipline, were “agnostic”—
disinclined toward any expression of healthy nationalism. At the same time,
one-sixth of the nation had been forced to emigrate, leaving the homeland
in order to simply survive. At the same time, socialists of a variety of persuasions proceeded to alienate perhaps as many nationals in the vain pursuit
of a utopian antinational “international proletarian revolution.”
Between the first and second congress of the Italian Nationalist Association—1910 and 1912—the ideology of Italian nationalism significantly
matured. After the declaration of war against the Ottoman Turks in 1911,
the nation had indifferently, if with some success, pursued war in North
Africa. Whatever the success, nationalist theoreticians, in general, were
dissatisfied. There was a demand that the nation be more assertive, that
the military be made more effective, that Italy pursue its material and
“spiritual” interests with more determination.
At the same time, between 1910 and 1912, Italian nationalism fractured on the issue of its relationship with the Catholic Church, and that
of the role of “democracy” in the expanding movement. Valli himself and
Scipio Sighele both insisted that the movement invest itself in some form
of “democracy.” For all that, those nationalists who imagined that democracy might be a constituent of an effective nationalism soon found themselves isolated in the ranks. Between 1912 and the nationalist congress in
Milan in 1914, both Valli and Sighele, together with hundreds of others,
absented themselves from the increasingly antidemocratic, imperialistic
5
Valli, “Che cosa è e che cosa vuole il nazionalismo,” p. 46.
E L E M E N T S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
41
Corradinian majority of the Nationalist Association.6 For the Corradinians, democracy had demonstrated its inefficacy in dealing both with economic competition and armed conflict. Italian parliamentary democracy
identified itself with economic liberalism—a commitment to free markets
and international competition that only served to demonstrate the manifest
disabilities that attended the nation’s attempt to compete with better-established and more-advanced industrial nations. More than that, political democracy had shown its tendential socialist bias by supporting domestic
welfare programs at the expense of the nation’s productivity. The discriminatory distribution of material benefits tended to undermine the collective
effort calculated to accumulate the capital necessary for production. More
than that, political democracy’s individualistic bias prejudiced the integral
unity of the nation.
Nationalists argued that distributionistic domestic policies weakened
the capital accumulation and productivistic essentials of a sound economic policy. For a nation that was resource and capital poor, “equitable
distribution,” the distribution of material benefits to those who would
employ them for simple consumption, reduced the availability of resources for production. It signaled a failure to accumulate resources that
would sustain and foster the development of essential infrastructure.
Political democracy had shown itself incapable of pursuing all the potential delivered to Italy as a new nation after the victory in Tripoli. With its
“populist,” individualistic, and distributionistic politics, it had domestically undermined capital and resource accumulation, essential to the resolution of the nation’s critical developmental problems. For the Corradinians, Italian nationalism was to be antiparliamentarian, antidemocratic,
collectivistic, and expansionist—with “expansionism” predicated on rapid
capital accumulation and industrial growth. Only in such fashion might
Italy support and enhance its ability to acquire increasing external market
shares, exercize cultural influence, as well as fuel irredentist and colonialist
territorial expansion.
By 1913, the Italian Nationalist Association enlisted Professor Alfredo
Rocco into its ranks. Born in Naples on the ninth of September 1875—
by the time he joined the Association, Rocco was a scholar recognized for
his expertise in commercial and financial law. At twenty-four, he served
as professor at Urbino and Macerata—ultimately, at thirty-eight, to serve
as professor of commercial law at the University of Padua, to be recognized as a scholar of considerable reputation.7
6
Ronald S. Cunsolo, Italian Nationalism: From Its Origins to World War II (Malabar,
Fl.: Robert E. Krieger, 1990), p. 111.
7
Nazareno Mezzetti, Alfredo Rocco nella dottrina e nel diritto della rivoluzione fascista
(Rome: Pinciana, 1930), p. 35.
42
CHAPTER THREE
As a very young man, Rocco had flirted with traditional Italian socialism—and had briefly enlisted in the Italian Radical party.8 Immediately
before the nationalist congress in Rome in 1914, he enscribed himself a
member of the Nationalist Association.9 He was to give explicit expression to Italian nationalism in the form of a theory of the state—that, in
its time and in modified form, was to inform Mussolini’s Fascism.10
By the time of his entry into the ranks of Italian nationalism, Rocco
had not only accepted the essentials of the Corradinian view of the contemporary world; he had given full articulation to a program of national
economic regeneration. It was based on a conviction that late industrial
development in the modern world was necessarily beset by critical and
disabling difficulties.
Rocco argued that because Italy had reunified late, and had begun its
industrial development equally late, it faced special infirmities.11 Unlike
other European nations, Italy had commenced its process of growth after
Great Britain, France, and Germany had established themselves as expansive, “imperialist” powers. Although only recently united, Germany had
begun its industrial growth early in the ninteenth century.
Not only had Italy united itself as a sovereign nation late; it possessed
little in the way of material or capital resources to sustain development.
It had embarked on indigenous industrial development only late in the
nineteenth century. By the time of the first decade of the twentieth century,
its per capita productivity was less than one-fifth that of Great Britain.
As a consequence of its disabilities, Rocco argued, Italy was being systematically plundered by the advanced industrial “plutocracies.” English,
French, and German investment, by repatriating profit from loans and
investments, was depleting the peninsula of its capital resources. Furthermore, the established economies were luring Italian labor to service their
needs. Outmigration was bleeding a developing Italy of its labor. Together
with all that, the advanced industrial powers were undermining the native
culture of the peninsula. Foreign cultural influences were everywhere, and
more often than not, more sought after by a passive population than those
that were indigenous.
8
See the account in Paolo Ungari, Alfredo Rocco e l’ideologia giuridica del fascismo
(Brescia: Morcelliana, 1963), pp. 29, n. 15; and Mezzetti, Alfredo Rocco, p. 42.
9
At the end of December 1913, Corradini specifically referred to Rocco’s adherence to
nationalism. Corradini, “Liberali e nazionalisti,” in Discorsi politici (1902–1923) (Florence: Vallecchi, 1923), p. 188.
10
See Alexander J. De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association and the Rise of Fascism
in Italy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 48.
11
The following account is taken from Alfredo Rocco, “Cause remote e prossime della
crisi dei partiti italiani”; “Il problema economico italiano”; and “Economia liberale, economia socialista, ed economia nazionale,” in SDP, vol. 1, pp. 5–58.
E L E M E N T S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
43
Cultural “imperialism” manifested itself in a variety of pernicious fashions. Rocco argued that because of their relatively unique histories in a
struggle against monarchial absolutism, the advanced industrial nations
of Europe had committed themselves to a form of exaggerated political
individualism. However efficacious that might have been in the struggle
against monarchial absolutism in those environments, political individualism, when transferred to late developers like Italy, did them a grievous
disservice. Political individualism made an effective defense of a recently
reunited political community extremely difficult. Nations that did not
enjoy a tradition of political unity suffered in terms of national consciousness when significantly influenced by the culture of emphatic individualism. For Rocco, nations that had undertaken political and economic development late faced very special handicaps.
Burdened by political individualism, those late-developing nations that
found themselves in competition with early developers could not mobilize
domestic forces to the tasks of solidarity and production. Fragmented by
parliamentary factionalism, the uncertainties of government response to
clientalistic influences, a “democratic” state could hardly serve the collective interests of the emerging nation.12
Individuals who exclusively sought their personal well-being, to the
exclusion of all else, were not equipped to defend their community or
sacrifice in its enterprise. If the irreducible concerns of the individual were
personal happiness and personal advantage, it was difficult to imagine
that the individual might be marshaled to the defense of the collectivity
in the contest with plutocratic states—or to the arduous labor required
by intensive and extensive industrial development.
If the community were required by circumstances to embark on rapid
economic and industrial development, it would be difficult to imagine
that such a program could enlist each individual’s enterprise if personal
well-being and welfare were his or her only motivations. Philosophical
individualism, and its expansive civil rights, made the process of political
and economic growth particularly difficult for late-developing nations.
Almost immediately upon his accession to membership in the Nationalist Association, Rocco brought considerable theoretical depth to its doctrine. Evident in his exposition were the argued insights of Friedrich List,
the mid-nineteenth-century German developmental economist.13 List, an
12
See the discussion in Rocco, “L’insufficienza dello state,” SDP, vol. 1, pp. 311–15.
See Rocco, “Economia liberale, economia socialista, ed economia nazionale,” SDP, 1,
pp. 40, 47; Mezzetti, Alfredo Rocco, p. 28. List exercised notable influence on the ideas
that governed the economic development of both Germany and the United States. See the
introduction to the English translation of 1916. Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy (New York; Longmans, Green and Co., 1916, a translation of the 1844 German edition).
13
44
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early contemporary of Karl Marx,14 had argued, in contradistinction to
the prevailing free trade convictions of the time, that any economic policy
not predicated on the preeminent collective interests of the nation invariably betrayed that nation’s long-term interests in pursuit of the immediate
benefits of living individuals. List, in effect, argued against economic liberalism as an initial strategy for late-developing nations.
Rocco, following List, maintained that those nations that had already
industrialized could very well allow economic liberalism to dictate national policy. It was a policy almost exclusively calculated to deliver material advantage to individuals, and special interest groups, rather than to
support national enterprise. It was not the case that a “hidden hand”
integrated the interests of individuals with those of a larger community.
An industrially developed economy might function reasonably well under
a laissez-faire regime—since it had already achieved the abundance that
allowed it to satisfy individual demands. In such an established industrial
economy, steadily increasing consumption would provide the escalating
effective demand that would supply a steady profit stream for the continuously expanding industrial base.
In a marginally developed system, Rocco argued, a disposition to increase general consumption would deplete potential capital resources.15
What a developing system required was not a rising or “more equitable”
rate of consumption, but an increasing measure of saving, essential for
rapid infrastructural, industrial, and technological development, the necessary condition for the commercial, financial, industrial, agricultural,
and military expansion of a new nation prepared to compete with those
established plutocracies with which it was forced to contend.
In the twentieth century, newly developing nations were not faced with
a landed aristocracy disposed to dissipate profit—extracted from agriculture—in conspicuous consumption. Emerging industrial nations hosted a
class of entrepreneurs prepared to reinvest the bulk of their profit in rapidly expanding infant industries. It was characteristic of an emerging capitalist class, Rocco maintained, that its members display a personal frugality that permits the resource accumulation necessary for the construction
of an infrastructure necessary for broad-based development.
With those arguments, Rocco reinforced the nationalist opposition to
political individualism, economic liberalism, and Marxian socialism.
With respect to socialism, he specifically argued that its entire program
predicated on the “equitable” distribution of “surplus value”—presumably “extorted” from the proletariat—would inevitably diminish the rate
14
See Roman Szporluk, Communism and Nationalism: Karl Marx versus Friedrich List
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
15
See Rocco, “Il problema economico italiano,” in SDP, vol. 1, pp. 14–15.
E L E M E N T S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
45
of capital accumulation essential to rapid economic and industrial growth
of developmental latecomers. Since domestic commodity production
could hardly be well established in such circumstances, any “equitable”
distribution of purchasing power would predictably see capital dissipated
in the purchase of foreign goods.
At the very center of Rocco’s account were all the elements of what
had already found expression in List’s “theory of the productive forces”
(Theorie der produktiven Kräfte).16 List had argued that the fate of nations was substantially influenced, if not determined, by the development
of its productive forces—and that development was contingent on those
factors rehearsed by Rocco.
Young nations, List had further argued, were significantly disadvantaged in the international competition with those already established. Established nations had every reason to foster “cosmopolitan,” or free
trade, orientations. Access to market supplements and investment opportunities outside the metropolitan nation were critical to the rising profit
levels necessary to sustain the expanded reproductive cycles of advanced
industry. “Free trade” and “free markets” served an instrumental purpose
in an economic system predicated on the already accomplished extensive
and intensive development of productive forces.
For less-developed nations, List admonished, it was necessary to generate, foster, and sustain the “courage to believe in a grand national future
and with such a faith to march forward with irrepressible national spirit.”
With the strength born of that courage and that faith, less-developed nations were required to bring together all the spiritual and material assets
required to provide the preconditions and fashion the infrastructure necessary for rapid industrial development and economic growth.17 Should
they be unable to mobilize those energies required for such tasks, the
denizens of less-developed, agrarian nations were condemned to simple
agricultural pursuits, “dullness of mind, awkwardness of body, obstinate
adherence to old notions, customs, methods and processes, want of culture, of prosperity, and of liberty.” Such people were condemned to poverty and powerlessness. “Who had not learned,” List went on, “. . . how
greatly the existence, the independence, and the strength of the nation
depends on its possession of a manufacturing power of its own, developed
in all its branches.”18 Because of their parlous circumstances in the mod16
See the entire discussion in Hartfrid Voss’s introduction to Friedrich List, Kräfte und
Mächte: Grundsätze-Lehren-Gedanken (Munich: Wilhelm Langewiesche-Brandt, 1942),
with particular reference to p. 23 for the identification of List’s ideas as a “theory of productive forces.”
17
Voss, in List, Kräfte und Mächte, pp. 10–13.
18
Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy (London: Longmans, Green,
1916), pp. 159, 320.
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ern world of reasonably well developed industrial competitors, less-developed nations were compelled to create a strong, centralized government
capable of marshaling all the community’s material and spiritual forces
if it were to accomplish the rapid development of its infrastructure, its
agriculture, and its industries.
In his discussion of the economic and political development of Italy, for
example, List rehearsed a catalog of conditions necessary to husband
that community through the phases of “slavery and serfdom, of barbarism and superstition, of national disunity and of caste privileges” to national unity, the acknowledgment that collective interests might enjoy precedence over those of the individual, until there was a clear onset of
development. In the process, List anticipated periods of antiliberal authoritarianism of indeterminate duration. Those periods would provide the
stability, the integrity, and the order, the security of property and the inculcation of institutional efficiencies essential to rapid economic growth and
industrial expansion.19
List’s “theory of the productive forces” clearly conceived productivity
to be at the center of human history. Those nations that had achieved a
level of industrial development capable of providing them power projection capabilities were nations that exercised superior political and cultural
influence over those less developed. Given their greater productive capability, their influence radiated outward to overwhelm and invest those
regions as yet less developed. Until less-developed nations matured to the
point where they could effectively compete with those more industrially
developed, they were destined to play only tangential roles in the drama
of human history.
List’s conception of the dynamics of human history shared some critical
similarities with that of traditional Marxism. Karl Marx entertained a notion of the role of “productive forces” in the course of human development. The central conviction of historical materialism was that human
history proceeded on the energy supplied by the growth of productive
forces. When a community’s “material productive forces” found themselves throttled by confining “productive relations,” revolution ensued—
freeing the productive forces to recommence an increased tempo of output.
When productivity expanded, communities projected their power over
lesser-developed regions. List, Marx, and Engels had all noted what was
a self-evident phenomenon in an environment characterized by the industrial revolution. England’s inroads into Africa and Asia were the substance of the diplomatic, military, and colonial history of the nineteenth
century. For Marx and Engels such a process was simply part of the “logic
of history.” For List, they constituted a political program.
19
Ibid., pp. 266–68.
E L E M E N T S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
47
All found the methods of penetration by the advanced industrial powers objectionable, but all recognized that such incursions “served the ends
of progress.” Marx reflected on the fact that while the British exploited
India and China for their own purposes, they also served the ultimate
ends of progress. He maintained that the British “had a double mission
in India: one destructive and the other regenerating—the annihilation of
old Asiatic society, and laying the material foundation of Western society
in Asia.”20 Driven by their search for profit, the British would advance
“civilization.” Marx insisted that British imperialism had precipitated
“social revolution” in Asia; imperialism “was the unconscious tool of
history.”21 The consequence could only be massive incentives for the rapid
economic and industrial development of the subcontinent.
Engels gave expression to the same concepts in his treatment of French
imperialism in North Africa. Commenting on the Bedouin resistence to
French rule, Engels maintained that it “was very fortunate that the Arabian chief had been taken” by the French. “The conquest of Algeria,”
Engels insisted, was “important and fortunate . . . for the progress of civilization. . . . After all,” he continued, “the modern bourgeois, with civilization, industry, order, and at least relative enlightenment following him,
is preferable to the feudal lord or to the marauding robber, with the barbarian state of society to which they belong.”22
Engels expressed the same convictions in discussing the seizure of
“Mexican lands” by the “energetic Yankees.” Engels argued, in the U.S.Mexican conflict of 1848, that the “energetic Yankees” had “increased
the medium of circulation, . . . concentrated in a few years a heavy population and an extensive trade on the most suitable part of the Pacific
Coast, . . . built great cities, . . . opened up steamship lines. . . . Because
of this the ‘independence’ of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may
be injured, but what do they count compared to such world historic
events? . . . When it is a question of the existence, of the free development
of all the resources of great nations, then . . . sentimentalities . . . will
decide nothing.” It is a matter of “trade, industry and profitable methods
of agriculture, . . . [the] level of social development of the individual peoples, . . . [the] influence of the more highly developed nation on the undeveloped one.”
The expansion of an industrially advanced nation into underdeveloped
regions marked a specific stage in the process of international economic
and manufacturing growth. Like List, Engels understood progress in his20
Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” in Shlomo Avineri, Karl
Marx on Colonialism and Modernization (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), p. 125.
21
Marx, “The British Rule in India,” ibid., pp. 88, 89.
22
Engels, “French Rule in Algeria,” ibid., p. 44.
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tory to be a function of the expansion of the more highly developed industrial nations binding together “tiny, crippled, powerless little nations
. . . in a great empire, and thereby [to enable] them to take part in an
historical role which, if left to themselves, would [remain] entirely foreign to them! . . . Without force and without an iron ruthlessness, nothing is accomplished in history.”23 The entire sequence was “natural” and
“inexorable.”
Whether Marx and Engels developed these insights from the earlier
perusal of the works of List remains uncertain—and is unimportant for
the purposes of this exposition. What is clear is that the notions entertained are the same as those found in the account provided by List before
either Marx or Engels published their major works after 1848.
For List, levels of productivity influence the ability of nations to extend
their economic, political, cultural, and military influence over less-developed territories. That process brought “progress” and “civilization” in its
wake. In his national developmental conceptions and those of historical
materialism, all that was the consequence of the development of the
“forces of production.”
To find the same collection of convictions in the essays written by Corradini and Rocco is unexceptional. They understood history to move with
the tempo supplied by the dynamics of production. The more-productive
nations extend their influence over those less productive, to stimulate in
them a cycle of economic growth and maturation. Imperialist powers,
“blindly responding to the natural order of things . . . make their ‘altruistic contribution’ to the collective good of humankind.”24 For Corradini,
economic “imperialism is space converted into wealth through labor” and
a fundamental part of the processes involved in the evolution of humankind.25 “Young nations,” to participate in those world historical processes, were required to discipline themselves to the use of available
human and material resources to sustain the rapid growth rates requisite
to compete effectively in an adversarial international environment.26
Rocco’s introduction of the thought of List into the deliberations of the
Nationalist Association accelerated the formulation of doctrine that was
to pass almost without alteration into the mature ideology of Fascism. By
1916, with Italy at war, Corradini gave fulsome shape to nationalism’s
own “theory” of imperialism, international development, as well as an
attendant “theory” of productive forces.
23
Engels, “Democratic Panslavism,” in P. W. Blackstock and B. F. Hoselitz, eds., The
Russian Menace to Europe (Glencoe: Free Press, 1952), pp. 71, 74, 75, 76.
24
Corradini, “La marcia dei produttori,” in La marcia dei produttori, pp. 187–88.
25
Ibid., p. 189.
26
Ibid., pp. 197–98.
E L E M E N T S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
49
In 1916, Corradini drew a picture of the modern world at the center
of which were productive forces as determinants.27 Like List and Rocco,
Corradini argued that the dynamic energy of the world as we knew it
was to be found in productivity. Those communities capable of superior
productivity expanded—commercially, economically, culturally, politically, and militarily. Their expansion permitted them to both inform and
fashion the world around them. Out of tribes and confederations, citystates and principalities of the past, modern nations and empires were to
grow, to cross-fertilize each other in a process into which the new Italy
found itself thrust. If Italy was to shape, rather than be shaped, in the
process, it would have to undertake industrial expansion and economic
growth at an accelerated pace.
The implications of the nationalist “theory of the productive forces”
were evident in the writings that appeared in the publications of the Nationalist Association. Economic growth and industrial development, it
was argued, assured the accumulation of assets that would benefit all
classes and sectors of the nation. It would demonstrate the pointlessness
of “class warfare.” The demand for increased productivity would place a
premium on ability and competence—and would commensurately reward
both. Increasing abundance would enhance the life circumstances of all
and allow for the education and skill training of the least qualified members of modern society—resulting in a constant infusion of new talents
into the ranks of prevailing functional elites. That would enrich the “productive aristocracy” of the nation to the benefit of all.
In the course of its development, the new nation would generate new
elites and new aristocracies—in a circulation of elites and aristocracies
that would ensure a continuous reaffirmation of talent and competence.
Class warfare would reveal itself as dysfunctional, fundamentally counterproductive, and irremediably reactionary.
By the advent of the First World War, both Rocco and Corradini argued
that Italy’s involvement made all that increasingly obvious. If the nation
were to survive the war that had become worldwide, and historic in implication, it required a measure of technical proficiency and industrial productivity that would assure a flow of armaments and weapon platforms
capable of surviving and prevailing against the products of advanced German industry.28 The extant “liberal,” “parliamentary” state that governed
the nation at war had shown itself to be wanting in a variety of ways. It
failed to effectively organize military production. It failed to ensure the
27
The following is taken from the account in Corradini, “La marcia dei produttori,” pp.
182–99.
28
See the section entitled “Artiglieria e munizionamento,” in Rocco, SDP, vol. 1, pp.
417–58.
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necessary raw materials to sustain lines of production. It failed to mobilize
the population to war. It failed to inspire through instruction or example.
And it allowed those who would undermine the war effort to continue
their subversions in both parliament and the state bureaucracy.29
By the time the Great War was drawing to its close, the intellectuals of
the Nationalist Association had drawn together all the lines of argument
here rehearsed. Implicit in that complex doctrinal argument was the acknowledgment that the classical Marxist argument concerning the role of
the productive forces in social development carried with it the entailment
that a specifically proletarian revolution made theoretical sense only in
advanced industrial environments. Only in such circumstances would the
“vast majority” of the working masses be urban-based “proletarians”
capable of assuming the governance of advanced industrial systems. Only
in such circumstances might socialism inherit the abundance necessary to
make “equitable distribution” feasible without economically disabling
the community. With the socialization of the fully mature “means of production,” and the distribution of its commodities, an advanced industrial
system might conceivably survive and prosper. Only where industrial capitalism had matured, concentrated itself in vast conglomerates, in environments dominated by a “vast majority” of proletarians, might traditional
socialism recommend itself. Rocco, Corradini, and the nationalists argued
that the case was entirely different with late-developing nations.
In a community only then commencing its economic and industrial
growth, traditional socialism was almost entirely without merit. Italy, as
a nation oppressed by the more advanced industrial powers at the turn
of the twentieth century, did not require proletarian revolution. What it
required was rapid industrial and economic development.30 What it required on the part of its citizens was a recognition that the welfare of all,
in the long term, depended on the heroic sacrifice of individuals—intense
individual labor and self-sacrificial commitment—in the short term.
Rocco argued that redistribution at the beginning of Italy’s industrial
development would net individuals but a small fraction of the benefits
that a dedicated policy of broad-based industrialization would ultimately
provide.31 He maintained that a program of heroic sacrifice and self-re29
See Rocco, “L’insufficienza dello stato” and “La sesta arma: La propaganda”; and “Il
dovere del governo e quello degli industriali,” in SDP, vol. 1, pp. 311–14, 365–68, 439–44;
Corradini, “La nuova forza dello stato”; and “La funzione morale degli uomini politici,”
in La marcia dei produttori, pp. 44–54, 63–69.
30
See the discussion in Corradini, “Il nazionalismo e i sindacati,” in DP, p. 421; Rocco,
“Il programma politico dell’Associazione nazionalista,” in SDP, vol. 2, p. 477; Rocco “Replica agli oratori,” in SDP, vol. 1, pp. 482, 483; “Il programma nazionalista,” in SDP, vol.
1, pp. 494, 502.
31
Rocco, “Il problema economico italiano,” SDP, 1, pp. 18–19.
E L E M E N T S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
51
straint on the part of labor would allow the rapid accumulation of capital
necessary for the maintenance, fostering, and sustenance of domestic industry32—which would ultimately redound to the benefit of all.
At the same time, Rocco argued that the working classes of the new
nation could not be alienated if the nation were to succeed in its development. He early maintained that the corporate interests of the working
classes would be defended by any nationalist and developmental government—however authoritarian—in order to ensure that the whole
would enjoy the level of collective integrity necessary for rapid economic
expansion.
To discharge its tasks, Rocco argued, the state in emerging Italy must
assume onerous responsibilities. It must seek not only to bring together
all constituents of the nation in an “organic and integral” unity; it must
labor to foster and maintain that unity.
For Rocco, like all the nationalists that had survived the winnowing of
nationalist ranks after 1911, the state in emerging Italy was to be absolutely sovereign. It could no longer remain passive, responsive to initiatives emanating from parochial interests. The argument was that as long
as the state remained unresponsive to its historic tasks, it would remain
hostage to the interests of ephemeral groups and parochial concerns that
found expression in a parliamentary system that was neither representative nor functional.
What emergent Italy required, Rocco contended, was a strong state,
animated by its own sovereign interests—capable of subordinating fractional and transient preoccupations to those both long term and primary.
What is interesting for the purposes of exposition is the fact that, by 1914,
some of the most notable revolutionary syndicalists, some of whom had
long given evidence of their antistate convictions, had begun to acknowledge the historical importance of the state in the circumstances in which
Italy found itself.
As the threat of war clouded Europe’s horizon during the summer
of 1914, Panfilo Gentile reminded Italy’s revolutionary syndicalists that
the unreflecting rejection of the state that typified the movement in the
past required reassessment.33 He argued that the state might serve the
community even after the threat of war had passed. He insisted that
whatever transpired during, and after, the war that had settled down on
Europe, the fact was that the state could very well be a critical agency—
even after the anticipated “socialist revolution.” Gentile argued that
given the diverse interests that would have to be accommodated in any
32
See Mezzetti, Alfredo Rocco, pp. 109–10.
The discussion below follows the account of Panfilo Gentile, “Stato e sindacato,” in
Utopia 2, nos. 9–10 (15–31 July 1914), pp. 273–77.
33
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complex industrial community, the state, “ejected through the door [by
the socialist revolution] would reenter through the window.” Evolving
contemporary circumstances made it clear that any revolutionary arrangements required “an authority, a force, superior to the parts, that
would discipline and coordinate all constituents to fully respect and discharge commitments made.”
Even antistate syndicalists began to reconsider their unreflecting rejection of the political state. Obviously precipitated by the realities of a war
that involved everyone in a fateful enterprise, revolutionary syndicalists seemed prepared to transfer such insights to a postwar Italy that
would face all the burdens of readjustment, growth, and international
competition.
By the commencement of the First World War, syndicalists argued that
while class-based syndicates might very well serve the corporate interests
of industrial labor, there was the evident need for some overarching national agency that could coordinate interests and negotiate differences. It
was suggested that syndicalists who had learned their antistatism from
the half-century-old analyses of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels might
do well to reconsider the unanticipated circumstances that governed the
modern world.
Revolutionary syndicalists like A. O. Olivetti, witnessing the disintegration of “socialist internationalism” under the pressure of events during
the summer and fall of 1914, made the case that some conception of a
“national socialism” should not be summarily dismissed.34 Given the new
reality, syndicalists must be prepared to acknowledge the influence of national sentiment on the overt political loyalties of Italy’s working classes.35
Olivetti recognized that the nation, presumably exorcised by traditional
Marxism, still retained a critical hold on many.36 He alluded to the increasingly evident emergence of a new conception of society and revolution—
one that was both idealist and aristocratic, regenerative and transformative, voluntaristic and heroic. Olivetti spoke of the first outlines of a new
society that appeared to be emerging—one no longer hostage to “mummified doctrines,” materialist or hedonistic. The new society would be one
of producers.37
34
With the founding of the Fascio rivoluzionario d’azione, Olivetti spoke of the role of
nationality as a factor in the unfolding of events. See A. O. Olivetti, “Manifesto del Fascio
rivoluzionario d’azione,” and “Ricominciando . . . ,” Pagine libere, 10 October 1914, reprinted in Battaglie sindacaliste: Dal sindacalismo al fascismo (typescript provided by the
Olivetti family), 2, pp. 86–93.
35
Olivetti, “Salutatemi i pacifisti,” Pagine libere 10 October 1914, pp. 94–96.
36
Olivetti, “La grande contraddizione,” Pagine libere 30 (November 1914), reprinted in
Battaglie sindacalista, pp. 105–9.
37
Olivetti, “Ricominciando . . . ,” in Battaglie sindacalista, pp. 89–93.
E L E M E N T S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
53
More than that, Olivetti, long antistatist in principle, suggested that
all features of inherited doctrines required review. International war had
revealed how much the sentiment of nationality influenced the masses of
Europe. That suggested a role for a superior agency that might mediate
the differences between the constituent elements of the national community. The state might serve as that agency, representing general national
interests as distinct from those that were parochial.38 He went on to suggest that the state might defend the general interests as distinct from any
class functions it might perform. The possibility that the state, long abjured by syndicalists, might serve trans-class functions signaled a fundamental, and hitherto unexpected, doctrinal change for Italy’s revolutionary left.39
It quickly became clear that the crisis that had overwhelmed Europe at
the end of the summer of 1914 had precipitated massive changes in the
ideological orientation of some of the most radical of Italy’s revolutionaries. The most significant changes took place in the thought of Benito Mussolini, political and intellectual leader of Italian socialism. As early as the
end of 1913, when the clear signs of the emerging crisis became clear,
Mussolini gave evidence of a kind of doctrinal restlessness.
At that time, Mussolini was prepared to acknowledge that events had
overtaken theoretical Marxism. As editor of his own journal, Utopia,
Mussolini sought serious theoretical review of the commitments made by
revolutionary socialists.40 He published a series of articles that signaled a
major revision of traditional socialist postures. He spoke, without equivocation, of an anticipated “revolutionary revision of socialism.”41 He
spoke, for example, of the failure of philosophical positivism that traditional Marxists had made their own. He held that contemporary science
had shown that human concerns were far too complicated to be resolved,
without remainder, into some set of deterministic propositions without
appeal to human will and commitment.
It was within that context that Mussolini published Giovanni Baldazzi’s article on the heroism, audacity, idealism, and sacrifice of revolutionaries like August Blanqui. The review of such elements in revolutionary activity was to serve as clear counsel to Italian socialists.42 Mussolini
38
Olivetti, “Postilla a ’Socialismo e guerra sono termini antitetici?’ Ancora per la neutralità di Arnoldo Norlenghi,” Pagine libere, in Battaglie Sindacalista, pp. 113.
39
Olivetti, “Noi e lo stato,” Pagine libere (15 November 1914), in Battaglie Sindacalista,
pp. 99–104.
40
Mussolini maintained that as editor of Utopia he could speak in the “first person,”
expressing his own views, and not as spokesman for the institutional Socialist Party. See
Mussolini, “Impresa disperata,” Utopia 2, no. 1 (15 January 1914), p. 1.
41
Mussolini, “Al largo!” Utopia 1, no. 1 (22 November 1913), p. 2.
42
Giovanni Baldazzi, “Augusto Blanqui,” Utopia 1, no. 1 (22 November 1913), pp.
18–25.
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published the article by Gerolamo Lazzei, who spoke unashamedly of the
“profoundly national” work of socialists.43 It was clear that Lazzei saw
no contradiction in a revolutionary commitment to both the nation as
well as to socialism. The fact that Mussolini chose to afford Lazzei space
in his journal was a matter of no small consequence.
In his journal, Mussolini published the article by Valentino Piccoli—an
exposition of the ideas of Henri Bergson and Georges Sorel—that argued
against the determinism and materialism of the socialism of the mid-nineteenth century. The article also alluded to the renovative influence of the
ideas of Giovanni Gentile—a nationalist—on the new ideas of an emerging modern revolutionary socialism.44 Angelo Tasca examined the ideas
of Giuseppe Lombardo-Radice, a follower of Gentile, that alluded to the
role of sentiment, will, passion, faith, and commitment in human action.
He spoke of the sentiment of nationality as one with which the working
classes might well identify.45
All of this constituted growing evidence of the emerging affinities between nationalism, revolutionary syndicalism, philosophical idealism,
and Italian socialism that had begun even before the war in Tripoli. Intimations of a form of statism, nationalism, antiparliamentarianism, together with an increasing emphasis on industrial production, began to
surface in the most radical syndicalist and socialist journals. The early
intellectual beliefs assumed by syndicalists like Paolo Orano—the elitism,
nationalism, productivism, and tentative statism of A. O. Olivetti—together with the transformative innovations of Mussolinian socialism after
191446—began to take on more and more of the doctrinal features of
Corradinian and Roccian nationalism.
The period between the war in Tripoli and the outbreak of the First
World War marked the increasing articulation of Corradinian and Roccian Italian nationalism. At the same time, there is clear evidence of a
transformation of the political thought of Mussolini —and many syndicalist and socialist “Mussoliniani”—away from that of an orthodox, if
revolutionary, Marxism, to an heretical, equally revolutionary, national
socialism. By the end of September 1914, Mussolini spoke of the “death
of the traditional socialist international” and the first intimations of a
new, dynamic, and revolutionary national socialism.47
43
Gerolamo Lazzeri, “Italiani e slavi a Trieste,” Utopia 2, no. 2 (30 January 1914), p. 53.
See the entire discussion in Valentino Piccoli, “Bergson e Sorel,” Utopia 2, nos. 3–4
(15–28 February 1914), pp. 94–100.
45
Angelo Tasca, “I socialisti e la scuola,” Utopia 2, nos. 3–4 (15–28 February 1914), pp.
101–11.
46
See A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979).
47
“L’homme qui cherche” (pen name of Mussolini), “Note di guerra,” Utopia 2, nos.
11–12 (15 August–1 September 1914), pp. 305–10.
44
E L E M E N T S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
55
In his journal, Mussolini gave prominence to an article by Mario Missiroli48—at the time, a Gentilean nationalist—that spoke of the necessity
of developing an industrial base for Italy. As a new nation, Missiroli argued, Italy required a broad industrial base to support the capabilities
that would be essential if the nation were to face the political, economic,
and military challenges of the time. Missiroli spoke of the collateral necessity of a strong state, if Italy were to develop, compete, and survive in
international competition with the advanced industrial powers.
In order to assure the degree of discipline and commitment necessary
for the complex process he anticipated, Missiroli spoke of a total moral
and political identification of the individual with the state and the nation.
Not only would such an identification foster the developmental, regenerative, and renovative process, but would serve as the necessary condition
of individual self-realization. He alluded to the philosophy of personal
fulfillment to which Giovanni Gentile, a nationalist and statist, had already given expression.49
Missiroli spoke of such a “modern state,” profoundly “idealist” and
“spiritual,” as the unexpected fulfillment of the promise of classical Marxism. Missiroli, in 1914, in the pages of Mussolini’s Utopia, provided the
intimations of a revolutionary national socialism—infilled with the
properties of a mature nationalism and an antimaterialist, neo-Hegelian
idealism.50
The circumstances surrounding the Italian war in Tripoli and the advent of the First World War had transformed the political environment on the Italian peninsula. The nationalists had anticipated much of
what was, and would be, transpiring. Initially, revolutionary syndicalists
had not.
Certainly, revolutionary syndicalists were philosophic and sociological
collectivists. Like the nationalists, they were intrinsically opposed to political individualism and the representative system it supported. They had
early committed themselves to the role of heroic minorities in the resolution of the revolutionary problems of their time—and they fully acknowledged the role of moral purpose and ideal commitment to the mobilization of revolutionaries. Revolutionary syndicalists initially imagined that
class identification was a privileged identification. As a consequence, they
originally dismissed the nation, the military, and all their attendant traditions as simply “oppressive” and “counterrevolutionary.”
48
Mario Missiroli, “L’Italia e la Triplice,” Utopia 2, nos. 11–12 (15 August–1 September
1914), pp. 343–48. See Mussolini’s comments on the piece on p. 343.
49
By the time of the publication of Missiroli’s essay, Gentile had already outlined his
political philosophy. See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher
of Fascism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001).
50
Missiroli, “L’Italia e la Triplice,” pp. 343–48.
56
CHAPTER THREE
Political nationalists, for their part, expected that the reality of the
world at the beginning of the twentieth century, involved as it was in the
relentless competition of the less-developed “new” nations against those
already established, would rapidly convince revolutionary syndicalists
that their interests would compel the “working classes” to identify with
their “proletarian nation” rather than with some fictive “promethean,
international class.” In fact, the intellectuals of the Italian Nationalist
Association anticipated that revolutionary syndicalism, given the prevailing realities, would rapidly transform itself into a recognizable form of
national syndicalism that would prove compatible with the emerging doctrine of revolutionary nationalism. In fact, by 1915, by the time of Italy’s
entrance into the First World War, syndicalism had already taken on some
of the properties of a revolutionary nationalism. The reality of the national sentiment that mobilized the revolutionary syndicalists and socialists of France and Germany around the standards of the nation discounted
the “internationalism” and “classism” of traditional Marxist revolutionary thought.
At the same time, most of the syndicalist intellectuals recognized that
Italy was industrially retrograde. As a necessary consequence, all the prognostications of classical Marxists were entirely unconvincing. There could
be no proletarian revolution in Italy. The proletarians of the peninsula,
even in terms of Marxist orthodoxy, were necessarily “immature.” Marxist revolution was perhaps on the agenda of a mature industrial economy—but there was scant prospect of a proletarian revolution in essentially agrarian Italy. Where an economy was “immature,” the proletariat
must necessarily be similarly “immature.”
In those circumstances, revolutionaries were charged with entirely unanticipated responsibilities. They were compelled to discharge “bourgeois” historic tasks: to advocate and collaborate in the industrialization
of the economically underdeveloped national territory. In effect, reality
dictated that revolutionary syndicalists be prepared to assume historic
responsibilities Marxism had not foreseen. They charged themselves with
the responsibility of bringing Italy, as a new nation, into the industrialized
twentieth century.
It was Filippo Corridoni, one of the most radical revolutionary syndicalists, who clearly articulated the changing obligations of revolutionaries.51 Corridoni reminded the Marxist revolutionaries of Italy that impoverished Italy was still in the “swaddling clothes” of industrial capitalism,
and, by implication, innocent of the conditions necessary for proletarian
revolution. An ineffectual bourgeoisie, failing to industrialize the nation,
51
See the biography of Ivon de Begnac, L’Arcangelo sindacalista (Filippo Corridoni) (Verona: Mondadori, 1943).
E L E M E N T S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
57
left the peninsula adrift, to face the depredations of foreign imperialisms.52
An “immature” proletariat was ill-equipped to assume meaningful responsibilities in a retrograde economic environment.
Corridoni reminded revolutionaries that Italy languished in “essentially
precapitalist” economic conditions—and, as a result, proletarian revolution was simply not on the historic agenda. What serious revolutionaries
were required to undertake, Corridoni asserted, was support for the rapid
industrialization of Italy as a “late developing nation.”53 He anticipated
that Italy’s historic responsibility was the rapid economic development of
its backward peninsula until it could directly and effectively compete with
those nations that had already developed and possessed the military and
economic capabilities that made them “great powers.”54
By the time of his death in the First World War, leading an attack on
the Austro-Hungarian enemy from the trenches of Frasche, Corridoni had
put together an unmistakable form of national syndicalism that shared
affinities with revolutionary nationalism. Corridoni, like the nationalists,
had made the “material productive forces” central to his analysis—and
had drawn conclusions similar to those entertained by Corradini and
Rocco. At least one variant of Italian syndicalism had transformed itself
into a qualified analogue of the revolutionary nationalism of the Italian
Nationalist Association.
This was the intellectual environment in which Alfredo Rocco produced the series of essays that shaped nationalist thought into a coherent,
comprehensive, and explicit doctrine—one that he identified as both “organic” in character and “spiritual” in substance. He duly spoke of the
articulation of principles from which doctrinal injunctions might be derived.55 It was a doctrine with which many revolutionary syndicalists were
prepared to identify—whatever their qualification.
In effect, by the time of the First World War, nationalism had matured
into a fulsome ideology from which an inclusive and practical political
doctrine might be forthcoming that could attract the most radical of Italy’s leftist revolutionaries. Rocco, like Corradini, had anticipated the
rapid approximation of revolutionary syndicalism to the developmental
nationalism that constituted the core of the doctrine of the Italian Nationalist Association. History was to prove them to be fundamentally correct.
Thereafter, nationalism was to represent itself with an explicit political
52
See Filippo Corridoni, Sindacalismo e repubblica (1915; reprint Milan: SAREP, 1945),
pp. 19, 20, 23, 25–27, 34, 37–38, 48.
53
See ibid., pp. 32, 70–71, 80–82, 92.
54
See Corridoni’s comments in “Testamento,” in Tullio Masotti, Corridoni (Milan: Canaro, 1932), pp. 253–57.
55
See Rocco, “Il programma politico dell’Associazione Nazionalista,” in SDP, vol. 2,
p. 476.
58
CHAPTER THREE
character. It was to be manifestly developmental, antidemocratic, antiparliamentarian, and statist. It was to be a doctrine that would attract leftist
as well as rightist intellectuals. In historic fact, what was transpiring was
a “synthesis between extreme Right and Left, which lay at the basis of
Fascism.”56
As early as 1913 and 1914, Rocco, like the revolutionary syndicalists,
had identified political and representative democracy with a form of debilitating individualism that made any collective, enduring, and demanding
national enterprise all but impossible. Rocco, like the revolutionary syndicalists, held that any commitment to protracted sacrifice—to heroic selfabnegation—required something more than the individualistic hedonism
that informed the liberal democracy of then contemporary Italy. If Italy
was to rapidly industrialize, in order to assume its rightful place among
the major powers, it would have to abandon political democracy, economic liberalism, and distributionistic socialism. By the advent of the First
World War, revolutionary syndicalists like Paolo Orano, A. O. Olivetti,
and Filippo Corridoni were professing convictions all but indistinguishable from those of the intellectuals of the Italian Nationalist Association.
The distinctions that remained between the doctrinal postures of the
increasingly nationalist syndicalists and the nationalists of the Italian Nationalist Association turned on (1) the character of the state, (2) the role
of the military in the development of the nation, (3) the nature of the
relationship between the new revolutionary state and the constituents of
the nation, and finally, (4) the developmental strategy of the forthcoming
revolution.
Even before the successful conclusion of the First World War, the intellectuals of the Italian Nationalist Association, unlike those of the revolutionary syndicalist organizations, sought the creation of a “strong” state,
more authoritarian than liberal, enjoying a measure of sovereignty not
anticipated by the most heretical of syndicalists. Nationalists anticipated
a recalibration of the relations between the Roman Catholic Church and
the sovereign state. Since the Church had resisted the secular reintegration
of Italy as a nation in defense of its own corporate interests, the initial
nationalist position was tendentially anticlerical. After the war in Libya,
however, a segment of political Catholicism had broken away from the
traditionalism of the Catholic past and had opened itself to the political
suasions of the nationalists. As a nationalist, Rocco argued that the “integral” regeneration of the nation—the marshaling of all elements of the
population in the mission to restore the grandeur of Italy—required a
proper political concern for the all-but-universal Roman Catholic reli56
De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association and the Rise of Fascism in Italy, p. 60.
E L E M E N T S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
59
gious commitment of Italians.57 Revolutionary nationalism would be
obliged to accommodate representatives of the Church as it would be
obliged to accommodate the representatives of what had been the antinationalist revolutionary proletariat.
Already by the time of the elections of 1913, an alliance of nationalists
and political Roman Catholics had brought some success to the antiliberal
and antisocialist policies of the Nationalist Association. Rocco had engineered gains for nationalism in the Veneto, and a regional federation was
formed. It was to go on to publish its own newspaper, Il Dovere nazionale.
At the same time, in accordance with the policy implications of its evolving doctrine, ties were forged with some industrial associations, attracted
by the nationalist program of rapid industrial and technological development of the peninsula. Among the most important of the industrial notables supporting the developmental program of the Italian Nationalist Association were Alberto Maria Bombrini, director of the Cogne Mining
Company, and Dante Ferraris, vice president of Fiat and president of Turin’s Industrial League. The growing relationship represented a convergence of interests between the nationalists, who advocated a rapid acceleration of Italy’s industrial and technological economic development, and
industrialists, whose interests such a policy might serve.58 Thus, at the
same time that Italy’s nationalists were fabricating a substantive relationship with the nation’s revolutionary syndicalists, they were establishing
connections with the Roman Church and the peninsula’s industrialists—
in the pursuit of a functional union of all within the integument of the
sovereign state.
It was during this period that nationalists formulated the first intimations of a future “corporative state,” a political arrangement in which organized Church, labor, and industrial interests would be accorded juridical
recognition—in order to create a legal environment in which all would
collaborate in a national enterprise committed to the creation of a “Greater
Italy” —involving the rapid and intensive industrialization of the peninsula.59 Rocco maintained that the modern period had introduced the necessity of an organization of corporate interests—all those aggregated and
articulate interests to be involved in the development of the nation.
Rocco argued that after the turn of the century, labor had organized
itself in syndicates—just as the Church had so organized itself by the time
of the nation’s reunification. By the advent of the First World War, entre57
See Rocco, “Che cosa è il nazionalismo e che cosa vogliono i nazionalisti,” in SDP,
vol. 1, pp. 80–81.
58
See De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association and the Rise of Fascism in Italy,
p. 52.
59
See Corradini, “Il nazionalismo e i sindacati,” in DP, pp. 423–24; Rocco, “Replica agli
oratori,” in SDP, vol. 2, p. 484.
60
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preneurs had similarly organized themselves in parallel organizations.
The empirical fact of such organization was demonstrable. The question
was how might an emerging nation deal with such an insistent, and potentially conflict laden, reality.
In order to embark upon its developmental program, Rocco contended
that a strong state would have to organize all syndical, church, academic,
educational, political, labor, and entrepreneurial associations within its
compass. The rationale rested on the conviction that “democratic” and
“liberal” states dissipated their sovereign energy in episodic responses to
clientelistic demands—something the developmental “integralist” state
could not.
Between 1914 and 1919, Rocco clearly anticipated the creation of a
revolutionary “corporate state” that would enlist all constituent corporate bodies of the nation in the service of the “massive productive enterprise” that was the necessary condition for the realization of Italy’s regeneration. Only in that fashion could the incompetent and flaccid state of
Italy’s forelorn past be displaced in order to realize the instauration of a
strong, centralizing, integrative corporative body.60
Rocco had given expression to a doctrinal conviction that a revolutionary state would emerge from an Italian victory at the conclusion of the
First World War. The war, he argued, had taught the nation a significant
lesson. Its victory in that war argued for Italy’s intrinsic capacity to
achieve the status of a major European power. Rocco insisted that what
victorious Italy required was a political and constitutional revolution that
would discard the liberal and representative parliament. Such revolution
would put together a strong, irreducibly sovereign state, which would
shepherd Italy into the modern age.
The prospect of achieving such an end turned on the union of nationalism with revolutionary national syndicalism. By 1918, the potential for
accomplishing such a union was manifest. It is only necessary to trace the
evolution of syndicalist thought, prior to that time, in the work of one of
its most accomplished theoreticians to appreciate that.
60
In his commentary on Rocco’s views, Nazareno Mezzetti argued that Rocco’s doctrine
was a consequence of his subscription to Fascism. That clearly was not the case. Rocco had
given voice to his views on the corporate state long before there was a Fascism. He had, in
fact, anticipated Fascism. See the discussion in Mezzetti, Alfredo Rocco, pp. 95–119.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sergio Panunzio: From Revolutionary
to National Syndicalism
THROUGH THE decade prior to the First World War, and the war’s culmination in 1918, the Italian political scene featured doctrinal changes
among Marxists that were to gradually allow a union of developmental
nationalism and revolutionary syndicalism. To trace the doctrinal developments during that period is essential to understanding how their ultimate union was to infuse Fascism with distinctive ideological character.
At each stage in the process, differences were clearly discernible—sometimes obscuring the maturing synthesis. Nationalist theoreticians, nonetheless, had early anticipated just such an outcome—and the informal
logic governing the development is relatively easy to reconstruct.
By the first years of the twentieth century, socialism in Italy had bifurcated, for all intents and purposes, into two main currents: reformist and
revisionist. Influenced by ideological developments in Germany, the majority of Italian socialists had early opted for a form of Marxism that
conceived the Italian Socialist Party a partner in a democratic and liberal
political enterprise that could be mobilized, through electoral victories,
to the advantage of the working class.
Why that should be so would require a complicated answer that would
tax the patience of readers and exceed the scope of this account. It is
interesting, however, that Eduard Bernstein, one of the principal intellectual heirs of classical Marxism, had undertaken to revise the inherited
formulations of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to “better accord” with
the evident facts of the turn of the century.1 The capitalist industrial system had not collapsed; there was no credible evidence of a secular decline
in the overall rate of profit in capitalist undertakings; society had not
been reduced to two hostile camps—bourgeois and proletarian—with the
proletarians constituting the “vast majority” of the population; there had
not been a concentration of capital in the hands of an exiguous minority
to the exclusion of small and medium enterprises; and, finally, the German
Social Democratic party had enjoyed considerable success in its competi1
See Eduard Bernstein, Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie available in English in abbreviated form as Evolutionary Socialism (New
York: Schocken, 1961).
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tion with its “bourgeois” political competitors.2 German socialism had
every reason to become reformist.
The result, in the judgment of some revolutionaries, was a German
Social Democracy that was “indecisive, prudent, legalitarian, and parliamentarian—postures that could only prolong the existence of the established system and obstruct the emergence of youthful forces.”3 More and
more European intellectuals found reformist, legalitarian, and parliamentary socialism increasingly unattractive.
Partially as a consequence of the influence of German Social Democracy, Italian socialism itself became increasingly reformist, choosing a
path of systemic reform through accommodation with the prevailing political system.4 Italian reformists became increasingly preoccupied with
“facts,” and political tactics. Unlike their German counterparts, however,
they were far less interested in the architecture of theory. Animated by
the prevailing epistemological positivism of the period, intellectuals like
Napoleone Colajanni interpreted the inherited Marxism in terms of the
prevailing evolutionary natural and social sciences of the end of the nineteenth century. Many revolutionary intellectuals, Paolo Orano, Alfredo
Niceforo, and Sergio Panunzio among them, came under the sway of philosophical positivists like Roberto Ardigò5—who succeeded in significantly influencing the ideological reflections of the period.
Positivism saw traditional Marxism in terms of lawlike social regularities—regularities very much like those that governed the physical universe. However “dialectical” those laws might be in the eyes of Marxists,
they were sublimely “objective” and independent of human influence.6
Regularities were to be observed and confirmed in overt social behaviors. There were objective patterns in the complexities of history—in
the collective behaviors of classes—that Karl Marx had outlined in
his works.
2
See Georges Sorel’s account in Les polémiques pour l’interprétation du Marxisme: Bernstein et Kautsky (Paris: Giard et E. Briere, 1900), pp. 31–34 and the comments of Enrico
Leone, Il sindacalismo, 2nd ed. (1906; Milan: Sandron), pp. 33–35, 63.
3
Roberto Michels, “Le syndicalisme et le socialisme en Allegmagne,” in Syndicalisme et
socialisme (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1908), p. 27.
4
Filippo Turati, Il Partito socialista italiano e le sue pretese tendenze (Milan: “Critica
sociale,” 1902), pp. 9–10.
5
See the account in Giovanni Marchesini, Roberto Ardigò: L’uomo e l’umanista (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1922).
6
See Paolo Orano, La logica della sociologia (Rome: Pensiero nuovo, 1898); and La
società-organismo ed il materialismo storico (Rome: Pensiero nuovo, 1898). In the preface
of his Il precursore Italiano di Carlo Marx (Rome: Enrico Voghera, 1899), p. v, Giacomo
Barzellotti identifies Orano’s work as representative of “positivistic methods.” Orano saw
“positivism” finding its completion in the “materialist interpretation of history.” Pp. 3–11,
167–68, 205.
S E R G I O PA N U N Z I O
63
Given such convictions, Marxist theoreticans like Filippo Turati oriented Italian socialism toward strategies compatible with the “laws” revealed in the work of the “Masters.” Society proceeded toward a predictable socialism with an “automaticity and an irresistibility” made manifest
in an “organic development of things.”7 Socialists were admonished to
pursue “immediate” and “practical” political endeavors that would parallel a sequence of events governed by historic “laws.” Moreover, conformity to those laws confined socialist options to what were perceived as
prevailing political realities. Friedrich Engels himself had written—at
about the time of his death—that “for forty years, Marx and I have consistently repeated that a democratic republic was the only political form in
which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can
first universalize itself, to subsequently achieve its goal with the decisive
victory of the proletariat.”8 It appeared that the die had been cast.
What seemed central to such convictions was the commitment to competitive political activities within the context of a parliamentary system.
The corollary to such a commitment was the notion that whatever the
resistance of its class enemies during and at the conclusion of such a protracted political process, the proletariat would inevitably be triumphant.
That was the predictable terminus of the lawlike, if “dialectical,” processes outlined by Marx in his works—and insisted upon by Engels. Until
the bourgeois class makes its inevitable recourse to violence, the working
class would proceed toward its goal, employing political means, with the
assurance that electoral success and legislative reform were necessary
stages in the imprescriptible and lawlike process. Engels had asserted that
“counter-revolutionary violence might retard [the success of the proletariat] for a few years—but, in the end, that could only render the triumph
of the working class more complete.”9
On the Italian peninsula, socialism was to pursue its goals through the
liberal and broadly democratic institutions of post-Risorgimento Italy.
Socialism was conceived a kind of lay Mazzinianism—without God, without the abiding sense of mission, without the symbols, and without the
nationalism. Armed revolution was subordinated to the status of a reactive response by the working class to initiatives undertaken by the ruling
bourgeoisie.
At about the same time, in both France and Italy, there developed a
reaction to what was seen to be essentially a commitment to meliorism
7
W. Kolb, “Zur Frage des Generalstreiks,” Sozialistische Monatshefte, 1904, p. 209,
cited in Arturo Labriola, Riforme e revoluzione sociale, 3rd ed. (1904; Naples: Partenopea,
1914), p. 3.
8
As cited, Roberto Michels, Storia critica del movimento socialista italiano (Florence:
“La voce,” 1926), p. 114.
9
Engels, as cited in Michels, Storia critica, p. 115.
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CHAPTER FOUR
and reformism among European socialists. French and Italian anarchists
and intellectual dissidents insisted that the truest Marxian ideals were
not reformist, but fundamentally revolutionary, as well as irrepressibly
antistatist and libertarian—all betrayed by institutional socialism.
In 1898, Georges Sorel published his L’Avenir socialiste des syndicats
in which he argued that reformism, with its inextricable involvement in
parliamentary democracy, dissipated the moral energy and neglected the
developing technical skill and productive enterprise of the rising proletariat—to produce a movement that was neither revolutionary nor effective.10 He proposed that the working class, organized in autonomous and
voluntary associations, undertake the revolution anticipated by Karl
Marx—without the interference of intellectuals or the dysfunctional commitment to politics.11
The Avenir socialiste des syndicats was quickly followed by a series of
works devoted to the appearance of what Sorel called the “new school.”12
Sorel’s volume Reflections on Violence, which appeared in Italy in 1906
(although parts had been published as early as 1901), exercised enormous
impact on Italian Marxists of sundry persuasions.13
By his own admission, Sorel was not given to systematic exposition.
His writings, he lamented, like those of J. J. Rousseau, lacked “harmony,
order and that connection of the parts which constitutes a unity.”14 As a
consequence, many revolutionary Marxists came away from them with
different understandings of their claims and attendant implications. That
notwithstanding, the central message of Sorel’s work was eminently clear.
He recommended an abandonment of “party socialism” and advocated
a return to “pure proletarianism”—an exclusive organization of workers
themselves. The “pure workers’ organizations” would arise spontaneously in modern industry—without the intervention of “intellectuals”—
more disposed as they were to detached rumination than action.15
For Sorel, intellectuals were responsible for the deflection of proletarian
energies. Intellectuals made recourse to intermediary institutions that
stood between the organized working class and their bourgeois enemies.
10
Georges Sorel, L’Avenir socialiste des syndicats (Paris: Librairie de l’art social, 1898),
pp. 26–31; and “Mes raisons du syndicalisme,” in Matériaux d’une théorie du prolétariat
(Paris: Marcel Reviére, 1909), translated into Italian to appear in Divenire sociale in 1910
with the title “Confessioni: Come divenni sindacalista.”
11
See the account given by Arturo Labriola, Riforme e rivoluzione sociale (1904; reprint,
Naples: Società editrice Partenopea, 1914), pp. 1–16.
12
Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1950, translation
of the 1906 edition with attachments), p. 137.
13
See Enzo Santarelli, La revisione del Marxismo in Italia: Studi di critica storica (Milan:
Feltrinelli, 1977), pp. 80–92; Michels, Storia critica, chap. 8.
14
See “Letter to Daniel Halevy,” in the introduction to Sorel, Reflections, p. 32.
15
Sorel, Reflections, pp. 50–52, 117.
S E R G I O PA N U N Z I O
65
It was they who—between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—interposed the “state,” fell back upon the sentiment of generic “patriotism,”
and invoked the military to suppress the righteous violence of the oppressed. Within this context, Sorel was intransigently opposed to the state
and all its collateral appurtenances.16
What was immediately transparent was the fact that Sorel was more
concerned with revolutionary behavior than he was with Marxist “science.” He sought to more adequately account for what moved revolutionaries to action, what made human beings courageous in the face of challenge and heroic when exposed to mortal danger. He sought to
understand what made human beings virtuous and selfless in a world that
every day gave more and more evidence of moral decay.
In response to that imperative, Sorel isolated those elements in human
behavior that appeared to sustain and inform individual and collective
heroism, sacrifice, and commitment. He identified those elements with
what he chose to call “myths,” figures of speech that, within themselves,
captured the essence of an imaginary future sought for with an irrepressible passion.17 Such evocative images of an anticipated future overcome
the sterilities of intellectualism—born of an absence of passion and a lack
of vitality.18 They create the ideal tension that inspires in the individual,
and in the group, the readiness to sacrifice in heroic selflessness in the
service of a higher good. Myths are generative of a salvific, renovating,
and uplifting “new” ethics.19
Myths, for Sorel, were characteristically born in battle. Throughout
history, war and its surrogate in revolution were the occasions out of
which myths arose, to shape human beings, and the civilizations they,
in turn, shaped. Democracy, compromise, and negotiation deflected the
promise and damped the ideal tension productive of myth—and the virtues that were its direct consequence.
For Sorel, the fact that Marx’s prediction that contemporary society
would increasingly divide itself into two, and no more than two, mutually
hostile classes was falsified by time, could be offset by the readiness of the
proletariat to remain intransigent, opposing its nonproletarian opponents
with absolute determination. The many groups in contemporary society
would thereby be reduced to two—divided on the field of battle—to restore the integrity of the original Marxist vision of socialist revolution.20
However much in error Marx might be in terms of his pretended predic16
Ibid., pp. 48, 129, 133, 134, 138, 210.
Ibid., pp. 48, 50–53, 57, 117, 140, 143–45, 147.
18
Ibid., pp. 50–53, 117.
19
Ibid., pp. 276–77.
20
Ibid., pp. 150, 154, 179.
17
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tions, the readiness of the proletariat to commit itself to combat in order
to realize its liberating vision of the future would restore vitality to Marx’s
revolutionary anticipations. Out of the crucible of class combat would
emerge the “sublimely heroic” worker, warrior, and producer of the anticipated syndicalist future.21
This was the ideological environment into which Sergio Panunzio, as
little more than a youth, found himself thrust. Panunzio—who, ultimately, was to serve as the “semiofficial theoretician of the Fascist regime”22—was born in Molfetta, in Southern Italy, on 20 September 1886,
and was active in socialist circles probably as early as 1901—and certainly
no later than 1903. In that year, his first articles appeared in the Avanguardia socialista, a revolutionary journal founded by Arturo Labriola, one
of the major intellectual leaders of the rapidly emerging syndicalist movement in Italy.23
The substantive core of Panunzio’s earliest publications clearly reflected
Sorelian concepts. In his graduate thesis, Una nuova aristocrazia sociale:
I sindacati, for the Faculty of Jurisprudence at the University of Naples,
Panunzio argued that select workers among those organized into syndicates (which at that time counted as members no more than 10 or 11
percent of the peninsula’s workers)24 constituted a “new aristocracy.”25
Among the members of the syndicates, an elite emerged to distinguish
themselves by their abilities and their virtues, superior to their confreres
in the self-affirming struggle against their oppressors. They were the select
of their community, around whom the general proletariat, with sacrifice
and selfless heroism, would accede to revolutionary power in Italy.26
Panunzio accepted all the essentials of revolutionary syndicalism: the
“myth” of the general strike that would inspire the revolutionary working
class to heroic enterprise; the insistence on direct action against class enemies; the explicit and intransigent opposition to the “bourgeois state”
with its seductive appeal to patriotic sentiment and militarism.27 There is
21
Ibid., p. 269.
Susanna de Angelis, “Sergio Panunzio: Rivoluzione e/o stato dei sindacati,” Storia
contemporanea 11, no. 6 (December 1980), p. 969.
23
Francesco Perfetti, “Introduction,” to Sergio Panunzio, Il fondamento giuridico del
fascismo (Rome: Bonacci, 1987), pp. 9–10, 12; see Labriola, Riforme e rivoluzione sociale.
24
See the discussion concerning the gradual industrialization of backward Italy during
this period in Michels, Storia critica, pp. 223–25, 233–35, and the estimate of organized
workers on pp. 326–27.
25
See the account in Giuseppe Prezzolini, La teoria sindacalista (Naples: Perrella, 1909),
pp. 95, 181, 191.
26
See the discussion in Panunzio, La persistenza del diritto (Pescara: Abruzzese, 1910),
pp. 277–78.
27
See Panunzio, Sindacalismo e Medio Evo (Politica contemporanea) (Naples: Partenopea, 1911), pp. 117–18, 128; and Persistenza del diritto, p. 253.
22
S E R G I O PA N U N Z I O
67
no doubt that, at that time, Panunzio considered himself an orthodox and
thoroughly committed revolutionary Marxist.28 Nonetheless, there was
evident, even in his earliest essays, a uniqueness of perspective, a subtlety
of analysis, that, in retrospect, suggested something of his future intellectual and political evolution.
At no time were Panunzio’s reflections confined exclusively to the inherited doctrinal literature of Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels. In his systematic
study of revolutionary dynamics, he read widely in the available nonMarxist social science literature of the period. His pages were dotted with
references, among others, to Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Lester
Ward, Friedrich Ratzel, Gabriel Tarde, Herbert Spencer, Werner Sombart, Alfred Marshall, and Gustav Ratzenhofer. For our purposes, one
name recurs with perhaps more frequency than the rest: that of Ludwig
Gumplowicz. In one of his first essays, Panunzio refered specifically to
Gumplowicz’s Die sociologische Staatsidee.29 Thereafter, at least until the
advent of the First World War, references to Gumplowicz appear in almost
everything Panunzio wrote.
In the writings of Gumplowicz we find a rich conceptualization of social
dynamics far more intricate and discriminating than anything immediately
available in the Marx-Engels corpus. While Marx and Engels speak of
history as the history of class conflict, Gumplowicz offers a textured account of history composed of a complex interaction of social elements—
hordes, tribes, clans, sects, ethnic communities, city-states, classes, nations,
and sundry “syngenetic” groups—spontaneous associations formed by a
natural solidarity, each configured by group-building influences—kinship,
shared interests, common territory, collective purpose, and a hostility to
outgroups—all interacting to produce the fabric of events.30
It is evident that Panunzio found Gumplowicz’s account persuasive. In
his “Socialismo, sindacalismo e sociologia” of 1907, Panunzio speaks of
history as being made up of the “eternal struggle” of “groups”—and (unlike Marx) not exclusively of “classes”—attributing the conception to
Gumplowicz.31 Nonetheless, Panunzio argues that in the modern period,
class has become real—taking precedence over any other collectivity—
because predicated on critical and irreducible life-sustaining and life-essential common interests. Out of the struggle for the very necessities of
28
Panunzio reported that he was “firmly convinced of historical materialism.” Persistenza del diritto, p. 214; see de Angelis, “Sergio Panunzio,” p. 969.
29
Panunzio, “Socialismo, sindacalismo e sociologia,” p. 170 n. 3, and pp. 231–32 n. 2.
30
The first major work outlining his conceptual framework was Ludwig Gumplowicz,
Der Rassenkampf: Sociologische Untersuchungen (Innsbruck: Wagner’schen Universität
Buchhandlung, 1883).
31
Panunzio, “Socialismo, sindacalismo e sociologia,” p. 170; and La persistenza del
diritto, p. 195.
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life, the working class, and the individuals of which it is composed, develop a clear sense of “vital interests,” of collective concerns, in what is
spoken of as “an instinct of self-affirmation.”32
In formulating his views in such a fashion, Panunzio was following the
lead of Sorel. Sorel spoke of the proletariat sharing the dispositions of the
tribes of antiquity, consecrated as it was to the ends of an association
of limited membership bound together by in-group amity and out-group
enmity.33 The class struggle, for Sorel, Gumplowicz, and Panunzio, was
simply one form of universal group struggle that has forever typified
human history.34
In his discussion of the formation of class consciousness, Panunzio employs all the central concepts of Gumplowicz.35 Aggregates of human beings, become—for both Gumplowicz and Panunzio—self-conscious and
self-regarding communities through cooperation reinforced by competition and conflict—through unconscious conformity to group suggestion,
mimetism, repetitive interaction, positive and negative reinforcement, and
social suasion.36
All of this served as a self-conscious supplement to traditional Marxism—innocent as Marxism was of any notion of the psychology of class
formation. Sorel had made Panunzio sensitive to the shortcomings of traditional Marxism as social science, and Panunzio was aware that there
was an intuitive sense of the incompatibility of Marxist economism and
the social science findings of the first decade of the twentieth century.
Panunzio spoke, in fact, of two theories, that of Marx’s historical materialism and that of then contemporary social psychology—arguing that
they were ultimately compatible and together delivered a more persuasive
account of social processes than either could alone.37
Panunzio was familiar with the reservations articulated by Sorel concerning the “scientific” status of much of traditional Marxism. Sorel maintained that most of the explanations advanced by the founders of Marxism
were, at their best, explanation sketches, laced together with trope and
metaphor, given substance by virtue of empty truisms accompanied by
broad and unconfirmed generalizations.38 There is little doubt that Panun32
See Panunzio, Sindacalismo e Medio Evo, pp. 118–19; and “Socialismo, sindacalismo
e sociologia,” p. 237.
33
See the comments by Edward Shils in his introduction to Sorel, Reflections on Violence,
pp. 17–18.
34
See, for example, Panunzio, La persistenza del diritto, pp. 261, 274.
35
See the account in Gumplowicz, Die sociologische Staatsidee, pp. 205–19.
36
See Panunzio. Il socialismo giuridico (Genoa: Libreria moderna, 1907), pp. 59–60.
Panunzio specifically cites Gumplowicz as his source; see p. 60 n. 1.
37
Panunzio, Socialismo giuridico, pp. 215–16.
38
“[In the Marxist texts] the relations . . . between the different orders of the ideological
superstructure and economics as [its base] can only be expressed by means of figurative
S E R G I O PA N U N Z I O
69
zio was fully aware of these reservations. Initially, he seemed disposed to
imagine them resolved by the works of others—Roberto Ardigò, Achille
Loria, and Antonio Labriola among them39—but it remained clear that
Sorel persisted in his reservations and continued to view the Marxism of
the nineteenth century not as science, but as a form of evocative epic.40
Panunzio’s first major work spoke somewhat cavalierly of the relationship of law to any given society’s economic base. He dismissed any notion
of law as the unique product of “solidarist sentiment” or “transcendental
ideas.” In his Il socialismo giuridico, Panunzio maintained that the “foundation of revolutionary socialism is economic, and that the ethical and
juridical changes contemplated by that revolution are a result of economic
change. Law is materialistically conceived not as self-standing, but as a
‘superstructure,’ an ‘epiphenomenon,’ that has its roots in the economic
substructure.”41 He made regular appeal to Gumplowicz’s identification
of force as the source and origin of law,42 going on to assert that “positive
law . . . is the infernal instrument with which the dominant classes seek
to maintain their privileges, legalizing their crimes against those classes
they dominate”—notions he equated with those of Marx’s “materialist
conception of history.”43
If the law of the anticipated socialist society was to be “solidarist,”
based on collectively oriented ethical and humane convictions, Panunzio
maintained, it could only be a reflection of antecedent revolutionary
changes in the economic base. Law was an “immediate reflex” of the
“economic base,” while the social psychology of any given period was its
“secondary reflex.”44
The account of law and society Panunzio delivered at twenty-one was
singularly simple and uncomplicated. He conceived the revolutionary future the direct product of changes in the economic base of society. As the
industrial economy deepens and expands, drawing workers together in
vast conglomerates, intensifying the exploitation without which capitalism cannot survive in circumstances of a declining rate of profit, labor is
speech. These figures of speech abound in the writings of Marx—making evident that none
of them is really satisfactory. If the relationship [between the ideological superstructure and
the economic base] was direct and determinant, one could characterize it with a specific
terminology, doing without metaphors.” Sorel, Saggi di critica del Marxismo (Milan: Sandron, 1903), p. 191.
39
Panunzio, Socialismo giuridico, pp. 193–94.
40
See Sorel’s introduction to the French edition of Arturo Labriola, Studio su Marx (Naples: Morano, 1926), appendix, pp. 269–87.
41
Panunazio, Il socialismo giuridico, p. 17.
42
Ibid., p. 195; in this regard, see Gumplowicz, Die sociologische Staatsidee, pp.
139–41.
43
Panunzio, Il socialismo giuridico, pp. 199, 201.
44
Ibid., pp. 211–13, 216–17.
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compelled to organize itself in voluntary associations that constitute the
first intimations of the future socialist society.
In fact, Sorel had delivered himself of a much more complicated picture
of the relationship of law and social change. Among the essays with which
Panunzio was clearly familiar was one entitled “The Juridical Ideas of
Marxism.”45
In that essay, Sorel argued that Marx’s account of the relationship between law and social change was much more sophisticated than most
Marxists were prepared to recognize. There were clearly instances, in
Marx’s account of British factory legislation and the administration of
British law, in which the role of ideological—that is to say, moral and
ethical, convictions—directly influenced social change. Marx, Sorel argued, did not enter into the particulars of these instances because he “always felt embarrassed when he found it necessary to deal with ideological
movements.” In the case of the British legislation of 1867 with which
Marx occupied himself, what was clear was that an “enormous transformation in law” had been an evident response to ideological pressures.
However little workers might have directly benefited from the law—disadvantaged as they were in an environment of “bourgeois dominance”—
ideological considerations had, nonetheless, influenced the laws governing Great Britain.46 The relationship of law, force, governance and the
economy was much more complicated than the twenty-one-year-old Panunzio had suggested in his Il socialismo giuridico.
What is clear is that Panunzio proceeded to develop a much more sophisticated conception of the relationship of law and society in works
that were to follow. In 1910, Panunzio published his La persistenza del
diritto in which he argued that law was intrinsic to society—and would
persist beyond the anticipated universal proletarian revolution. “I have
always been convinced,” he informed his readers, “of the social necessity
of law . . . and have so maintained against those anarchists who see the
fulfillment of human liberty only in opposition to the positive ordinances
of law.”47
In his Il socialismo giuridico he had made general reference to the persistence of both law and authority in society, insisting upon the distinction
between his syndicalist convictions and those of anarchists.48 In La persistenza del diritto he developed those themes in a fashion that prefigured
his subsequent intellectual development.
45
Sorel, Saggi di critica del Marxismo, pp. 189–23.
Ibid., pp. 210–11.
47
Panunzio, La persistenza del diritto, p. x.
48
Panunzio, Il socialismo giuridico, p. 230 n. 2, where he argued that the new positive
law that would emerge from the syndicalist system would be governed by the same authority
as that of bourgeois law.
46
S E R G I O PA N U N Z I O
71
In that latter work, Panunzio argued that law was intrinsic and necessary to human society, essential to human liberty, requiring for its actuation the power of command—authority. The text was devoted to an account of how law and authority arise and function in a community.
Panunzio argued that the disposition to obey social norms, characterized
as a natural feature of social life, was a constant feature of associated life.
The willed regularities of collective behavior, when governed by public
sanctions, constitute the substance of law. Obedience to law, he argued,
was not simply or characteristically coerced; it arises out of the very circumstances of social life.49 The authority that sustains law, Panunzio proceeded, is not external to the willed behaviors of individuals, but is intrinsic to them and to the human condition.
Panunzio identified both law and authority as among the most exalted
products of the social spirit of humankind.50 He devoted a substantial
part of his text to the provision of an empirical account of what philosophers of law dealt with in a priori fashion. Law, for Panunzio, grew out
of the custom and usage that typifies the conduct of human beings living
in “organic” association—that is to say, living together in functional relationships typified by families in which there is a division of labor designed
to sustain the viability and unity of the association as well as produce
offspring equipped to carry the community into the future. Such associations, for Panunzio, are “organic,” not the simple arbitrary products of
a thoughtless “authority.”
Obedience to law, and respect for the authority that sustains it, Panunzio argued, finds its origin in the natural human trait of making positive
response to suggestion from primary group members, imitating the behavior of peers and superiors, and being responsive to affirmations of value
common to the community. The very nature of in-group amity renders
the individual susceptible to social influences that govern not only behaviors, but a sense of appropriate conduct, and helps generate the moral
and ethical convictions that sustain all of that.51
Such group behaviors, obedience to law and respect for authority,
strengthen the community in circumstances of threat. They enhance survival in a dangerous environment, ensuring the continuity of the community and its members. Departures from those behaviors threaten that survival. When a community is sound, the functional behavior of its members
is spontaneous and uncoerced. It is only when the community is stressed,
in a state of real or potential disaggregation, that coercive authority must
49
Panunzio, La persistenza del diritto, pp. x–xi, xxi.
Ibid., p. xii.
51
Ibid., pp. 18–28.
50
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be invoked in order to preserve what used to be its organic integration.
Authority then becomes peremptory and absolute.52
Panunzio argued that the modern state, the class-based state analyzed
by Marx, was a state intrinsically afflicted by those critical tensions attendant on the effort to bind together opposing classes that were animated
by fundamentally antithetical interests. Such a state can elicit group-sustaining conformity only through the imposition of arbitrary and inflexible
authority. The modern state, for Panunzio, was an unnatural aggregate,
composed of a disparate collection of entities artificially put together and
identified as a “people.”53
As indicated, Panunzio had early identified human society as composed
of groups, sociological entities manifest in a variety of empirical forms,
some real and some artificial. In La persistenza del diritto, he held that
the modern state, the “bourgeois” nation, and the “people” who made
up its citizenry were “artificial”54—held together with arbitrary power
sustained by security and military formations.55 Panunzio, like all of his
contemporary syndicalists, was antistate and antimilitary. For him, the
only immediately real sociologically significant groups were the economic
syndicates, the organized industrial workers of his time.
Panunzio held that the industrial syndicates were voluntary associations that reflected the true and abiding interests of their members. Unlike
the political state, the syndicates were homogeneous in their composition,
reflecting the homogeneity of the interests of their members.
In those circumstances, the conduct of individual members reflected the
shared interests and the group sympathy natural to organic, functional
communities. The behavior of individuals was uncoerced and spontaneous, unselfish and unreflective. Their conduct was unselfconsciously
moral, governed by ethical principles, which might well be only implicit,
but which could be identified by observation. Law and authority, in such
situations, appeared effortless, rendered apparent only to constrain the
conduct of those few suffering personality disorders that left them incapable of normal primary and secondary socialization.
Compared to the effortless law and ethical conduct that characterized
the syndicates and their members, Panunzio maintained that the political
state of his time gave every evidence of senescence, disintegrating into its
constituents. The political democracy and representative parliamentarianism jerry built by the bourgeoisie could no longer hold the prevailing
state structure together. The rising revolutionary proletariat could no
52
See, for example, the discussion ibid., pp. 67, 71–72, 84–85.
Ibid., pp. 34, 192–94.
54
Ibid., pp. 193–94, 197, 254.
55
See ibid., p. 204.
53
S E R G I O PA N U N Z I O
73
longer be contained in the old, unresponsive system. The general strike,
the principal weapon available to organized labor, could bring down the
entire shabby structure of modern society. At the same time, the syndicates, possessed of their own autonomous law and authority, would federate into agencies “harmoniously” incorporating all the lesser syndical
entities into a superior “organic” body that would represent a “perfect
and distinct incarnation of authority.”56
To the complaint of critics that he had only “transformed” rather than
abolished the state, Panunzio responded that what syndicalism anticipated was a form of social order that no longer featured the properties
of that “artificial” political agency identified as the “bourgeois state.”
Syndicalists sought governance through autonomous, decentralized, lawengendering, real communities, rather than the artificially contrived political state. The syndicalist community would be a form of institutionalized,
corporative self-governance—a “Social Republic of Labor.” The federated syndicalist community would extend its authority over a defined territory and would represent the specifically political interests of the combined constituent syndicates. It would represent the interdependent will
of the more ample and more general corporative interests of the confederated syndicates.57
Panunzio viewed all this as a modern conception of social and political
organization predicated on the new learning of social psychology. He
suggested that political communities composed of functional entities,
each vested with a kind of initial political autonomy, would remain interdependent—and would represent a more inclusive, more diversified collective will that would find itself embodied in a single, larger, federated
sovereignty.58
Such a law-governed and spontaneously authoritarian syndicalist-corporativist sovereignty would be the product of violent revolution—like
all fundamental changes in law and authority in human history. Old systems of law and authority, once they were no longer capable of fostering
and sustaining the prevailing order, were overthrown by a more functional and energetic alternative. The content of law and authority change,
but their forms remain the same.
Thus, while Panunzio recognized that law and authority are given different content as a consequence of the threat or employment of violence,
law and authority are neither intrinsically the products of, nor imposed
by, violence. By 1910, Panunzio had moved a considerable distance from
the position he had earlier assumed. Law was no longer spoken of as
56
Ibid., pp. 206, 212.
Ibid., pp. 199–201, 203, 207–17.
58
Ibid., p. 199.
57
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essentially the product of violence; it was seen as the natural product of
custom, usage, and mimetism among the members of an organic community united in a common destiny. Authority was portrayed as the source
of legitimation. It warrants the exercise of sanction that, in turn, makes
law of mimetism, custom, and usage.59 Authority itself has a rationale to
which legitimacy ultimately makes appeal.
By 1911, Panunzio had articulated a conception of syndicalism that
conceived it a new revolutionary movement, animated by pedagogical
responsibilities and moral imperatives, almost religious in character, that
would mobilize masses in the heroic service of a vast and complex mission
that would transform the world of the twentieth century.60 It was a movement, led by self-selected elites, that anticipated a political and territorially defined regime, based on vital economic interests, characterized by
law, and governed by an authority to which an integral and organic union
of persons would voluntarily submit.
In all of this, the young Panunzio recognized that his intellectual work
had only commenced. He recognized that he was little schooled in the
philosophy of law and had restricted himself largely to law and authority
as empirical realities with which revolutionaries were compelled to deal.
In 1912, on the other hand, he began to undertake more systematic study
of his subject matter. He assumed professional obligations with the teaching of pedagogy at the Royal Normal Schools at Casale Monferrato and
Ferrara and law at the Universities of Naples and Bologna.
Panunzio’s Il diritto e l’autorità, which appeared in 1912, marked a
significant change in the nature and character of his thought. In that work,
he clearly separated himself from the prevailing positivism so evident in
his first publications. In his introduction, Panunzio confessed that the then
prevailing positivism, the scientism, of the turn of the century, so seductive
to so many, had been grievously misleading. Positivism’s dismissal of philosophical inquiry as empty metaphyics had led many thinkers to neglect
the serious philosophical study of the subjects that engaged them.61 For
Panunzio, the study of law and authority had suffered.
In seeking to remedy the circumstances, Panunzio appealed to a roster
of idealist philosophers, ranging from Rousseau to Kant through Hegel.
In Il diritto e l’autorità, Panunzio recognized that any specifically sociological account of the origins and nature of law and authority62 was to be
59
See the discussion ibid., pp. 257–61.
See Panunzio, Sindacalismo e Medio Evo, p. 107; and La persistenza del diritto,
p. 259.
61
Panunzio, Il diritto e l’autorità: Contributo alla concezione filosofica del diritto (Turin:
UTET, 1912), pp. vii–vii.
62
See the account in Gumplowicz, Die sociologische Staatsidee, pp. 127–32; and Outlines of Sociology (New York: Paine-Whitman, 1963), pp. 260–80.
60
S E R G I O PA N U N Z I O
75
considered, at best, a preliminary effort at understanding. In order to
actually achieve comprehensive understanding, any such study would
have to be subordinate to a careful, a priori conceptual analysis without
which it would remain “blind.” Conceptual analysis, “thought about
thought,” Panunzio held, must necessarily precede the serious study of
law and authority. It had become clear that Panunzio was no longer content with any suggestion that law, justice, and authority were simply “reflections” of an economic “base,” or contrivences to “serve the interests
of the stronger.”63
For Panunzio, in the study of law and society, of revolution and the
state, thought would have to precede experience. One could not simply
inspect the past and cobble together a collection of convictions about the
essence of law, rights, revolution and authority. Only through the possession of ideas might one recognize the facts out of which defensible views
might, in principle, be formulated. In any serious study, the relationship
of ideas to facts is reciprocal. Cognitive form is necessary to provide a
vehicle for empirical content, but content can, and does, render form comprehensible.64
By 1912, Panunzio was clearly under the intellectual influence of Benedetto Croce, at that time the principal spokesman for Italian neo-Hegelianism. Allusions to Croce had been made as early as Panunzio’s first
published works, but most of the references were general in nature. In Il
diritto e l’autorità there was no doubt that much of Panunzio’s analysis
was Crocean in inspiration.
What had happened was a confluence of Kantian and neo-Hegelian
insights that produced a volume that argued that law was a specifically
utilitarian concern, an expression of Kant’s practical reason, that carried
with it, in its administration, authority.65 Panunzio argued that the very
nature of human beings implied society, society implied law, and law implied authority. As the very existence of community implied a sustaining
economy, it also implied law as a functional and calculated necessity. And
law implied authority.
For Panunzio, several things were demonstrably true: (1) the very idea
of humanity implies community; (2) law is logically anterior to community;66 (3) and law implies authority—a “preponderant, superindividual,
and informing will.”67 What did not follow, Panunzio argued at that time,
was that the state, alone, was the respository of law and authority.
63
See Gumplowicz’s comment in Outlines of Sociology, p. 265.
Panunzio, Il diritto e l’autorità, pp. xv–xvi, xvii, xxii.
65
Ibid., pp. 7–14.
66
Ibid., pp. 83–84.
67
Ibid., pp. 196 and 197–98 n. 2.
64
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He argued that any association of human beings—united in interest
and destiny—employed law and authority to sustain itself. It was clear
that he was arguing that autonomous workers’ associations, syndicates,
might be fully capable of invoking and administering law without the
superintendence of the state. In his Sindacalismo e Medio Evo, written
about the same time as Il diritto e l’autorità, almost his entire account was
devoted to the nature of law, and its sustaining authority, that governed
syndical and corporative behavior in medieval Italy.68
The argument, derivative of philosophical idealism, was that law and
authority preceded the political state, and would survive it. The state was
only one of the possible and contingent agencies of law and authority.
Thus, while law and authority were immanent and essential to collective
life, the “modern bourgeois state” was not. Any functional community
was fully capable, under appropriate historic circumstances, of exercising
judicial power through the law and invoking the authority always implicit
in associated life. Throughout time, Panunzio reminded his audience, law
and authority were found manifest in clan, village, polis, communal and
corporate entities.69
The argument was very clear. Workers voluntarily associated themselves in industrial unions. They governed themselves by laws of their
own making. For Panunzio those voluntary associations, composed of
intelligent and committed proletarian members—a new “social aristocracy”—would produce the “new, free, strong and beautiful” creators of
a new morality—the denizens of the revolutionary future.70
For all intents and purposes, Panunzio concluded this period in his intellectual and political development with Lo stato di diritto, a systematic
study of the German concept Rechtsstaat—the “law-governed state” or
the “state of laws.” That work was devoted to an account of the “juridical
state,” the state devoted to the maintenance and protection of individual
freedom.
By that time, Panunzio identified his interests in law with the philosophy of Kant—who conceived human beings exclusively as ends and never
means. Panunzio argued that the modern era had been born in the French
Revolution and that European law had emerged from that doctrinal and
historic experience intent upon the defense of individual political and
civil rights. It was Kant who provided that defense with its philosophical
rationale.71
68
Panunzio, Sindacalismo e Medio Evo.
Panunzio, Il diritto e l’autorità, pp. 215–17.
70
Panunzio, “Socialismo, sindacalismo e sociologia,” pp. 234, 236, 238.
71
Panunzio, Lo stato di diritto (Ferrara: Taddei, 1921, but written in 1913–14. See
p. vii.).
69
S E R G I O PA N U N Z I O
77
Panunzio argued that true socialism descended through the revolutionary thought of J. J. Rousseau and Kant—embodied in Rousseau’s social
contract convictions and Kant’s Rechtsstaat, with its defense of the rights
of individuals. For Panunzio, revolutionary socialism could only find expression in freedom for all, in a society in which all had property, and in
which the authority that animated law was a reflection of the will of all.
In that socialism, the bourgeois state, as such, had no place. The purpose of revoluton was “the violent overthrow of the prevailing superstructure of the state and its law” that was the contemporary world’s inheritance from the past. The consequence would be the instauration of a
syndicalist society in which governance would be through the law and
authority of an “overarching confederational agency” imbued with the
“eternal and immortal principles of idealism and natural law.”72
The First World War interrupted Panunzio’s philosophical and political
development. He had already, by the time of Italy’s war in Tripoli in
1911–12, shown some signs of disaffection from traditional socialism’s
implacable internationalism.73 With the advent of the European war, all
of Italy’s socialists found themselves overwhelmed by the prospect that
the nation might be drawn into international conflict.
At that time Italy was, by treaty, allied with Germany and AustriaHungary. Most of its irredentist, economic, sentimental, and military interests argued, however, for alignment with Great Britain, France, and
Russia. The official Socialist party insisted on absolute neutrality. The
proletariat was not to be employed in a “capitalists’ war.”
It became evident almost immediately that socialists of a variety of persuasions would not be content with the injunction to maintain neutrality
in a conflict that promised to shape the future for the major powers of
the continent. Revolutionary syndicalists were among the first to break
ranks with the official socialist position. Panunzio was among them. By
December 1914, Panunzio was among the founders of a fascio interventionista (an association for intervention in the conflict) in Ferrara.74 Immediately upon the outbreak of war, Panunzio had submitted an article, “Il
socialismo e la guerra,” to Utopia, a journal edited by Benito Mussolini,
devoted to recounting the compelling reasons why Italy must enter the
conflict on the side of the Allied powers.
In his argument, Panunzio reminded Mussolini and his readers that
“revolutionaries had forever been committed to fight for . . . the [socialist]
72
Panunzio, “Il socialismo, la filosofia del diritto e lo stato,” in Rivista giuridica del
socialismo, 1914, pp. 81, 84.
73
Francesco Perfetti, “Introduction” in Sergio Panunzio, Il fondamento giuridico del fascismo (Rome: Bonacci, 1987), p. 38.
74
See Paul Corner, Fascism in Ferrara, 1915–1925 (London: Oxford University Press,
1975), pp. 24–25.
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idea to the exclusion of every materialistic and egoistic motive.” The defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary in war would open a future in
which socialism would triumph. If socialists truly opposed the “feudal
militarism” of Germany on the grounds of socialist principles, then Italy’s
entrance into the war was morally obligatory.75
In the course of his account, while he did not himself invoke the issue
of nationality or national interest to support his case, Panunzio noted that
the war had provided absolute evidence that the “principle of nationality”
had united the peoples of France and Germany each into an integral unity.76
It was in the totally unanticipated patriotic response of millions to the
demands made by war that Panunzio first saw the outlines of what would
constitute the mobilizing myth of his revolution. In May 1915, in the days
immediately following Italy’s commitment to war against Germany and
Austria-Hungary, Panunzio addressed himself, without hesitation and with
consuming sentiment, to the call of the “nation”—the “fatherland.”
In his judgment, he had witnessed a united people rise up and overwhelm
the obstructionism of an increasingly dysfunctional parliament. He insisted
that he had witnessed a united nation commit itself to the test of mortal
conflict through the “direct action” about which syndicalism had long spoken.77 He expected that the evolving conflict would tax Italians in a fashion
unknown in any “class struggle.” Italians would emerge from the “hurricane of death and fire” as “new men,” the “warrior-producers” anticipated
by the early syndicalist vision of Georges Sorel. Italians, forged in war,
would emerge as a Fascio nazionale, a dedicated “national union.” The
aristocracy of warrior-producers that would survive the Great War would
marshal all nationalists of the peninsula to meet the demands of a revolutionary mission that was taking on increasingly clear form.
As an interventionist, Panunzio anticipated that a new nation would
emerge from the war that would unite all classes, factions, and regions
within its confines to the service of a mission that would be of historic
consequence. The new nation that would emerge from the war would be
informed by “a strong, austere and rigorous moral character—a character
that was the glory of those first heroic times of disciplined socialism.”78
All of the courage, commitment, and selflessness syndicalists had seen
in the laboring masses of Italy, throughout the long struggle against the
unresponsive and callous state, had been reborn in the combat veterans
75
Panunzio, “Il socialismo e la guerra,” Utopia 2, nos. 11–12 (15 August–15 September
1914), p. 324.
76
Ibid.
77
Panunzio, “La monarchia nazionale,” Popolo d’Italia, 24 June 1915, reprinted in Stato
nazionale e sindacati (Milan: “Imperia,” 1924), pp. 13–21.
78
“Educazione politica,” and “Una forza,” in Stato nazionale e sindacati, pp. 28, 34,
35, 36.
S E R G I O PA N U N Z I O
79
who had survived the holocaust along the Isonzo, the Carso, and the
Piave.
By the end of the war, Panunzio saw in the Great War the moral and
political equivalent of the syndicalist “general strike.” It was a conflict
that had exposed all the frailties of the prevailing arrangements. The Italian parliament and the Italian state both lacked efficacy and coherence.
The entire structure of society, composed of independent associations,
professional leagues, and voluntary groups, failed to have representation
in, or identify themselves with, the larger community. All the arguments
Panunzio had formulated concerning the union of syndicalist and corporate bodies in a superintendent confederation were reinvoked. Only with
that new invocation, the nation was identified as the foundation of a
union of functional components—and the revolutionary state, unlike the
state of the bourgeoisie, was seen as that agency endowed with the authority necessary for the administration of law as collective will.79
The nation was recognized as one of those critical communities early
identified by Gumplowicz as agents of history. Panunzio had originally
discounted the nation because he counted it an artificial collection of communities, each with its own interests. By the end of the Great War he
was prepared to acknowledge that Italians, the body of a “nation,” were
unmistakably animated by a “living and vital national sentiment” that
superseded narrower and more parochial interests. “The war had proved
beyond question,” in his judgment, “that an Italian worker and an Italian
entrepreneur shared a greater sense of affinity . . . than was possible between an Italian and German worker.”80 Shared territory and a shared
history—in which entire nations, animated by common culture and common aspirations, reacted to the offenses, the exactions, and the pretenses
of others—made nationality an active principle in modern history.
By 1918, the nation had become a core concept of Panunzio’s evolving
“national syndicalism.” In the emerging circumstances of post–World
War One Italy, Panunzio saw all organized interests finding representation
in a revolutionary syndicalist-corporativist state—a state “indisputeably
superior to the parochial interests of classes, sects, categories, and all particular interests.” It would be a state that would bring together, in an
inclusive unity, all the factors necessary to render the nation “an organic,
concrete, and historic” reality.81
Panunzio clearly recognized that all this had been implicit in his first
theoretical writings. He recognized that the historical vehicle—the exclu79
The following discussion is taken from Panunzio, “Il sindacalismo nazionale,” which
was written in November 1918 and was published in Panunzio, La lega delle nazioni (Ferrara: Taddei, 1920) and republished in Stato nazionale e sindacati, pp. 92–105.
80
“Il sindacalismo nazionale,” p. 100.
81
Ibid., p. 105.
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sively economic and proletarian syndicates—that he had chosen to represent the revolutionary future in 1907 simply could not serve. All the assessments he had worked through in the years between that time and the
war were perfectly valid—it was their referent that was wrong. It was not
the proletarian syndicate that was the agency of the future revolution—
it was the “young and proletarian nation.”82
Panunzio was never to renounce those works produced between 1907
and 1915. He was simply to transfer the assessments that were made in
them to the political, social, and economic environment of the Italy newly
emerged from First World War. After 1918, Panunzio recognized the nation as the Sorelian “myth” he had first sought in the revolutionary “proletarian general strike.” That sense of “mission”—so important to Sorel and
all the syndicalists he inspired—Panunzio found in the revolutionary challenge of making “proletarian Italy” a great nation. The men of valor and
purpose who were to have led the syndicalist revolution Panunzio found
in those who emerged from the war as the heroes of the trenches. They
were to constitute the elite that would energize masses through example
and invocation. By 1919, Panunzio conceived the producer-warriors marshaled around the guidons of the first Fascism to have been the “new men”
envisioned by revolutionary proletarian syndicalism before the Great War.
Panunzio expected the nationalists of Italy to join the ranks of national
syndicalism. They had early recognized the affinities shared by both antidemocratic, antiparlimentarian, nationalist, developmental, and revolutionary movements.83 Because of the productionistic intentions of nationalism, the leaders of nationalism expected to recruit among workers.
Panunzio anticipated those workers would be from the syndicalist organizations already active. By 1918, Panunzio correctly anticipated the formal
fusion between the political nationalist and the national syndicalist movements that, in fact, took place in 1923 in the course of Fascism’s entrenchment as a regime.
By 1918, a year before the founding of Fascism, national syndicalism
had matured as a doctrine. At the very commencement of the European
war in 1914, A. O. Olivetti, one of syndicalism’s foremost theoreticians,
pointed to an evident reality: socialism, as an international revolutionary
association, had disintegrated under the pressure of nationalism. By 1915,
almost every socialist organization in Europe had opted to support its respective nation in the conflict.84 By May 1918, Olivetti spoke, without theoretical embarrassment, of the “nation as the permanent patrimony of his82
Panunzio, “Il sindacalismo nazionale II,” Stato nazionale e sindacati, p. 108.
Ibid., p. 109.
84
A. O. Olivetti, “Parole chiare: La grande contradizione,” Pagine libere, 30 November
1914, in Battaglie sindacaliste, pp. 105–9.
83
S E R G I O PA N U N Z I O
81
tory” for which masses were prepared to sacrifice their lives, their health,
and their property. More than that, the nation was a functional association
designed to produce the goods that would not only sustain its population,
but underwrite its future in a threatening international environment.85
In November 1918, Mussolini himself identified national syndicalism
as a doctrine that would unite economic classes behind a program of national growth and development. For the nation to emerge from the Great
War as a potential member of the circle of victorious “great powers,” it
would be necessary to establish a “constructive” regime of “major production . . . a mode of reorganization of economic relations [calculated
to generate] maximum return. . . . National syndicalism will make of Italy
. . . a greater nation.”86
Mussolini followed the theoretical developments among the syndicalist
revolutionaries of France and Italy. In France, Leon Jouhaux had led a
group within the Confederation generale du Travail to accept production,
and national orientation, as revolutionary imperatives for a postwar syndicalism.87 Mussolini carefully followed the development, and it is of
some significance that on the first of August 1918, Mussolini changed the
subtitle of his newspaper, Il popolo d’Italia, from “A socialist newspaper,” to “A paper of combatants and producers,” to reflect the national
syndicalist conviction that the revolutionary future would belong to the
“warrior-producers” early anticipated by the proletarian syndicalism of
Georges Sorel.
By that time, Sorel himself had discovered affinities with French nationalism. He had long held that the heroic struggle of human beings in the
consecrated and selfless service to the ends of a community bound in committed solidarity constituted the highest moral good. Sorel had originally
perceived that committed community of solidarity in the workers’ syndicates of the first decade of the twentieth century. By the end of the First
World War, the nation appeared a more likely prospect.88
In substance, the thought of Panunzio had followed a sequence that
was not uncommon among the revolutionaries of the first two decades of
the twentieth century. From the initial positivism and scientism that had
dominated the thought of those revolutionaries, he progressed through
philosophical pragmatism to some form of critical idealism.
85
Olivetti, “Nazione e class,” Battaglie sindacaliste, pp. 116–18.
Benito Mussolini, “Il sindacalismo nazionale: Per rinascere!” Opera omnia (Florence:
La fenice, 1953–64), vol. 12, 11–14.
87
See Francesco Perfetti, Il sindacalismo fascista: I—Dalle origini alla vigilia dello stato
corporativo (1919–1930) (Rome: Bonacci, 1988), pp. 10–11.
88
Richard Humphrey, Georges Sorel: Prophet without Honor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 20–21.
86
82
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Sorel had led the way.89 Never convinced that there were deterministic
laws governing the behavior of human beings, he had left latitude for the
social and historic influence of “myth,” sentiment, commitment to duty,
and the abiding sense of moral obligation.90 By the time he had written Il
concetto della guerra giusta in 1917, Panunzio had assimilated all the
qualifications concerning the “scientific” conviction that there were
“laws” governing individual and collective human life. By that time, he
spoke of the works of Ludwig Gumplowicz—which he had originally
identified as providing “positive social science” confirmation of the economic materialism of Karl Marx—as “ultramaterialistic” and “mechanistic.” Panunzio had come to understand that law, morality, ethics and
group sentiment were potent factors in the evolution of society. He sought
illumination in epistemological and ontological idealism. He spoke of history as a product of the human spirit and saw, in the best of Marx, the
intimations of a “philosophic, idealistic, and humanistic” conception of
individual and social life.91
In 1914, Panunzio had largely given himself over to a form of Kantianism, an emphasis on individualism, and a philosophy of law as an application of Kant’s practical ethics to life and society. He had, by then, been
introduced to neo-Hegelianism in the works of Benedetto Croce and had
accepted many of its analyses. By 1917, Panunzio spoke of justice as a
product of human activity. Law was not something fixed and finished to
be discovered; it was something that emerged from a process that was
inherent in the human condition. “Justice,” Panunzio argued, “ . . . like
truth, was something that was in and with humankind,” not something
external. Justice, truth, and history were all products of “the incessant
and irrepressible human spirit—divine because human.” All these were
products of the human spirit, the result of what he identified as “autoctisi,” the “immanent self-development of the the human being,” a concept
central to the idealist philosophy of Giovanni Gentile.92
While there were approximations of Gentile’s idealism in the work of
Panunzio, it is clear, at the time of the conclusion of the First World War,
89
See Pierre Andreu, Sorel: Il nostro maestro (Rome: Volpe, 1966), chap. 6.
Georgi Plekhanov raised objection to such qualifications in the works of Italian syndicalists. He persisted in the conviction that Marx and Engels had discovered the “laws” of
human behavior. See Plekhanov, Sindicalismo y marxismo (Mexico, D.F.: Grijalbo, 1968.
Translated from the Russian edition of 1920).
91
See the discussion in Panunzio, Il concetto della guerra giusta (Campobasso: Giolitti e
figlio, 1917), pp. 69–71, n. 2 in its entirety.
92
Panunzio, Il concetto della guerra giusta, p. 67. Panunzio, on this occasion, chose to
speak of his conception of justice as predicated on Gentilean inspiration, and as “immanent
juridical idealism” citing the “beautiful pages” on the subject to be found in Gentile’s Sommario di pedagogia. See pp. 67–68, n. 1 in its entirety.
90
S E R G I O PA N U N Z I O
83
that the main arguments, critical to his analyses, were Kantian, individualistic, and libertarian in character. While he continued to cite the work of
Gentile,93 he made eminently clear his commitment to the “natural law”94
basis of his conception of the state, law, and society—a notion, because
transcendent to, rather than immanent in, human consciousness, differed
from that of Gentile’s absolute idealism.
It is evident that Panunzio had not settled his account with modern
philosophy by the time of the appearance of the first Fascism. Like many
syndicalist thinkers, Panunzio had moved from philosophical positivism
to one or another form of idealism.95 What was not resolved, apparently,
was the specific intellectual form that commitment would take.
By the end of the First World War, Panunzio expected Europe, if not
the world, to enter into a period of systematic reconstruction after a long
revolutionary interlude—a period he anticipated would be under the influence of Gentile’s “Actualist” idealism, together with nationalism, socialism, and futurism96—all movements that would come together to produce Fascism. The period he anticipated would be one of order and
solidarity, in which there would be a decided inclination among human
beings to “obey and serve, to be free within order and within a system,
to not so much search for rights as they would for law.”97
By the time that the first Fascist squads arose, almost spontaneously,
from the violence of the Great War, Panunzio had subscribed to, and in
part articulated, the doctrine that was to be national syndicalism—an
intrinsic component of the ideology of Fascism. National syndicalism
shared evident affinities with the political nationalism of Enrico Corradini
and Alfredo Rocco. It had begun to feature some of the species traits of
neo-Hegelian idealism. In that latter regard, there remained a persistent
tension between the Kantian libertarianism of Panunzio’s earlier writings
and the universalism and totalitarianism of Gentile’s Actualism—a neoHegelian and post-Kantian idealism that had already begun, by the time
of the formal establishment of Fascism, to inform the movement.
Nationalism, national syndicalism, and Gentile’s neo-Hegelianism had
begun to come together to produce the ideology of Mussolini’s Fascism.
It was within those fateful years, between 1919 and 1925, that Fascism
93
See Panunzio Introduzione alla società delle nazioni (Ferrara: Taddei e figli, 1920), pp.
22, 30.
94
Ibid., p. 26.
95
This was true of Mussolini as well, who began his career as a socialist intellectual
with a commitment to the scientism of the beginning of the century to finally settle on an
epistemological, and perhaps an ontological, idealism. See Mussolini, “Per la vera pacificazione,” in Opera omnia, 18, p. 298.
96
Panunzio, Introduzione all società delle nazioni, p. 19.
97
Ibid., p. 25.
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matured into the developmental totalitarianism that was to shape much
of the twentieth century. It was the thought of Giovanni Gentile that was
to provide many of the ligaments that wove together its ideology. And it
was to be Ugo Spirito who was to translate Gentile’s thought into the
political currency of the period.
CHAPTER FIVE
Idealism, Ugo Spirito, and the Outlines
of Fascist Doctrine
YEARS BEFORE the outbreak of the First World War, Giovanni Gentile
articulated an interpretation of reality and politics into which prewar nationalism and revolutionary syndicalism were subsequently to merge.1 By
the first years of the 1920s, Gentile’s philosophical Actualism became
the vehicle of an inclusive national syndicalism that accommodated the
thought of Enrico Corradini, Alfredo Rocco, and Sergio Panunzio. By the
time the March on Rome brought Fascism to power, both Rocco and
Panunzio had identified nationalism and syndicalism as critical constituents of its ideological rationale.2 As has been indicated, both had gradually come together in the years before the Great War, until there was remarkably little doctrinal distance between them. It was clear that
nationalists had early anticipated a coalescence of nationalism and syndicalism—and by the end of the war, the revolutionary syndicalism of
A. O. Olivetti, Paolo Orano, and Sergio Panunzio had adopted so many
of the essentials of Italian nationalism that their subsequent merger might
easily have been anticipated.
Immediately before the Fascist March on Rome in October 1922, Panunzio published his “Stato e sindacati,” in which he called for the creation of a “syndicalist state,” in which the state, “as idea,” would become “absolute”—the “living incarnation of the social idea.”3 By the
time of the Fascist revolution, Panunzio identified the first period of syndicalist agitation—from the beginning of the twentieth century until
about the time of the Great War—as “revolutionary,” and “critical.”
The subsequent period, which he anticipated would follow the Fascist
seizure of power, was conceived “synthetic” and “constructive.” After
1
For a fuller account of the work of Gentile and its relationship to Fascism, see A. James
Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: The Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001); and Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction,
1999), chap. 5.
2
See Alfredo Rocco, “Costituzione e funzioni delle corporazioni,” in La formazione
dello stato fascista (Milan: Giuffre, 1935), p. 1008; and Sergio Panunzio, Italo Balbo
(Milan: Imperia, 1922), p. 11.
3
Sergio Panunzio, “Stato e sindacati,” Rivista internazionale di filosofia del diritto 3
(January–March 1923), p. 9. The article was written in mid-1922; see p. 1 n. 1.
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the disintegration of the liberal state, during the initial heroic period of
Sorellian revolutionary violence, Panunzio expected the Fascist state to
emerge as “absolute,” with the plurality of syndicates “living with and
for the state.”4
By 1923, Panunzio traced revolutionary syndicalism from its origins
with Georges Sorel through the philosophical insights of Georg W. F.
Hegel to the idealism of the Gentileans.5 Panunzio understood the “syndicalist state” he anticipated to be the constructive response of the nation
to the disintegration of the antebellum liberal state.
By the time Fascism came to power, Panunzio argued that revolutionary
syndicalism had been transformed by history and circumstance from a
defender of anarchism and individualism into an advocate of the social
and juridical reconstruction of the anti-individualistic and authoritarian
state. It was at that time that Gentile’s Actualism gave every appearance
of being capable of providing a synthesizing philosophical rationale for
emerging Fascism.
The nationalist preoccupation with law and the state, and revolutionary syndicalism’s rapid abandonment of the simple materialism and the
antistate postures that had sustained it during the first years of the new
century, cried out for an inclusive normative rationale that would be
their common vindication. It soon became evident to more astute observers, Benito Mussolini among them, that Actualism might fulfill that critical function.
By the end of the Great War, Gentile had formulated the principal outlines of a political philosophy that was to provide the union of nationalism and syndicalism with its rationale.6 By 1918, Gentile spoke of anticipating the postwar emergence of a revolutionary “new state” that would
be the expression of the “fully rational and concrete” national will of
Italians in their collectivity. In that “revolutionary state,” politics and
morality, parochial and national interests, would combine in such a fashion that individuals would fully identify themselves with its actions. That
new state would be a spiritual reality in which all would find their place.
It would be a modern state that would provide labor fulsome standing. It
would be a state charged with the accelerated development of an industrially, culturally, and politically retrograde peninsula. Gentile recognized
that just such developments would be essential if the newly reunited nation was to escape from the palpably inferior position to which it was
assigned by its industrially advanced contemporaries.7
4
Ibid., p. 20.
Ibid., pp. 4, 6, 7.
6
For a more detailed treatment, see Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, chaps. 2–5.
7
See the discussion in Giovanni Gentile, “Politica e filosofia,” Politica 1, no. 2 (15 December 1918), pp. 39–54; and Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, pp. 25, 35, 46, 52, 65, 84–85.
5
O U T L I N E S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
87
The new state would find its leaders among those who would sense the
needs of their time. Gentile was convinced that, particularly in times of
crisis, uniquely gifted individuals were capable of intuiting prevailing political sentiment. Such leaders would be those who would represent their
people as heads of state, or leaders of revolutions—manifesting a will not
limited to his or her own individuality, but which would encompass the
general will of all.8
Gentile’s was a political concept rooted in the antiindividualism of classical idealism. The concept of politics entertained by Actualism was typical of that tradition. It was eminently inclusive—one in which the empirical, solitary, “abstract,” individual, together with classes of individuals,
the leadership of the state, and the state itself, constituted, in Gentile’s
judgment, an integral moral unity—what Gentile chose to consider a collective, if pluriform, “concrete individuality.”9
That inclusive and collective sense of personhood underlay Gentile’s
entire conception of politics, law, and the state. By 1916, as a teacher of
jurisprudence at the Atheneum in Pisa, Gentile taught that law and morality were, in some comprehensive sense, all one—with abstract distinctions
to be made at the point at which the empirical individual found himself
or herself confronted by statute law. For Gentile, law—at its very origins—was necessarily and inextricably moral—and, by implication, inescapably universal. As statute law, morality took on the features of “externality”—but faced with the responsibility of conforming, or not, to its
strictures, the individual is compelled to deal with the intrinsic universality involved in the entire process.10
Out of that practical experience, the abstract individual of liberalism
was introduced to the concrete, collective reality of the more expansive
self of public morality. Morality entails universality—implying a “totalitarian” collectivity.
In effect, Gentile began his analysis with the Kantian distinction between practical and pure reason, between the mundane empirical self and
the theoretical “transcendental self,” in much the same fashion as had
Sergio Panunzio at about the same time.11 For Gentile, by 1916, all those
8
Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, p. 6.
See Gentile, L’Atto del pensare come atto puro (1912; reprint, Florence: Sansoni, 1937),
para. 11, pp. 23–24; and “Politica e filosofia,” pp. 50–51.
10
See the discussion in Giovanni Gentile, I fondamenti della filosofia del diritto, 3rd ed.
(1916; Florence: Sansoni, 1955), pp. 100–1.
11
At about the same time that Panunzio wrote his La persistenza del diritto (Pescara:
Abruzzese, 1910), Gentile was writing an introduction to Bertrando Spaventa’s Principii di
Etica (1903), in which the distinction between law, morality, and ethics was still argued
within the Hegelian concept of the “practical spirit.” See the discussion in Giuseppe Maggiore, “Il problema del diritto nel pensiero di Giovanni Gentile,” in Giovanni Gentile: La
vita e il pensiero (Florence: Sansoni, 1948), 1, pp. 231–44.
9
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distinctions originally introduced by Panunzio in 1907 were identified as
“abstract” moments actually immanent in the ultimate concreteness of
jurisprudence and ethics—of law and morality.12 By the end of the First
World War, Gentile had, by and large, completed his post-Kantian and
radical reformation of the Hegelian dialectic to produce the “Actualism,”
the “philosophy of pure act,” that was to address all the issues of politics,
law, ethics, and morality that were to engage Fascism.13
By the time the first Fascist “action squads” mobilized in Northern Italy
in 1919, nationalism, national syndicalism, and Actualism had begun to
come together to provide them their first clear intimations of a nationalist,
developmental, revolutionary, and philosophical rationale.14 At that juncture, Panunzio gave explicit expression to his national syndicalist commitments. Like the Actualists, he spoke of genuine political convictions as a
union of thought and action.15 He clearly held that his convictions, just
such a synthesis, inspired his political behaviors. He spoke of an emerging
political aristocracy expected to staff a revolutionary state that would, in
turn, foster a new and revolutionary collective consciousness. He spoke
of the state organizing inarticulate masses into productive “corporations”
that would serve as institutionalized agents of the state.16
Mussolini succeeded, constitutionally, to rule in October 1922 with the
invitation of King Victor Emmanuel to form a new government. With his
ascendency, he immediately called upon Giovanni Gentile to serve as his
counselor. He identified his new Minister of Education as his “teacher,”17
and subsequently named him president of the commission charged with
the responsibility of suggesting changes to the essentially liberal Albertine
Constitution—to better conform to the requirements of the new regime.
12
Gentile, I fondamenti della filosofia del diritto, pp. 98–100.
See Gentile, La riforma della dialettica hegeliana (Messina: Principato, 1913).
14
By the time of the rise of Fascism, Mussolini was addressing himself to the role of the
“spirit” in the political processes of the peninsula. He clearly identified himself with a form
of epistemological and probably ontological idealism. See Benito Mussolini, “Da che parte
va il mondo?” and “Per la vera pacificazione,” in Opera omnia (Florence: Fenice, 1967.
Hereafter Oo), 18, pp. 70, 298; and “La culla e il resto,” together with “Deviazioni,” in
Oo, vol. 17, pp. 90 and 129. Already in 1918, the antidemocratic, antipacifist nationalists
of the Associazione nazionalista published the first issue of Politica in which they identified
the nation with spirit and the state as its central institution—all calculated to further the
industrial, territorial, and diplomatic expansion of the Fatherland (see “Manifesto,” Politica
1, no. 1 [15 December 1918], pp. 1–17).
15
Gentile had long since insisted on the immanence of action in thought. See Gentile,
“Politica e filosofia,” pp. 42, 44, 52–53. Panunzio made regular recourse to such a characterization.
16
Sergio Panunzio, “Un programma d’azione,” Il Rinnovamento 1, no. 2 (15 March
1919), pp. 83–89.
17
Gabriele Turi, Giovanni Gentile: Una biografia (Florence: Giunti, 1995), p. 307.
13
O U T L I N E S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
89
As yet uncertain in power, Fascism was to proceed with the articulation
of its formal ideology between 1923 and 1925. It was during that period
that Panunzio, already an intimate of Mussolini, formulated the outlines
of a revolutionary doctrine that combined elements of the syndicalism
with which he had grown, the nationalism of the Associazione nazionalista, and the Actualism of Gentile.
Panunzio spoke of the poverty and humiliation suffered by Italians in
modern times, and addressed himself to the critical functions expected of
the state if the nation were to enter into the ranks of those already developed—those powers that dominated the peace arrangements that concluded the First World War. He spoke of the union of national syndicalism
and nationalism as essential to the creation of just such a state.18
By the time of the first formulations of the political program of Fascism,
it was manifestly evident that reactive and developmental nationalism
was at the center of its convictions. Mussolini identified the nation as “the
social organization” that “at that historic moment” was “dominant in
the world.”
The single imperative ideal “to which all else is subordinated,” Mussolini maintained, was the maximization of the interests of the nation.19
Should the evidence indicate that the nation prospered under a monarchy,
Fascists were monarchists. Should there be evidence that the monarchy
was dysfunctional, Fascists would be republicans.
Governed by the same criteria, neither war nor violence were ends in
themselves. They were approved if instrumental to the purposes of the
nation and abjured if not.20 Neither a collectivism nor an individualist
economy—an economy govered by state administration or by “free market” initiatives—were, in and of themselves, perceived as essentially Fascist. Their advocacy turned on their ability to enhance those productive
capabilities that were critical to national purpose.21 The arrangements
that were considered conducive to those ends were chosen by Fascist theoreticians, at any given time, by what they considered best evidence.
That, once acknowledged, the informal logic of the Fascist position
becomes apparent. The nation-state, as the contemporary vehicle of individual and group fulfillment, enjoys priority of commitment. Only in the
development and expansion of the nation-state would the individual and
constituent classes find their own fulfillment.22
18
Sergio Panunzio, Che cos’è il fascismo (Milan: Alpes, 1924), pp. 15, 23.
Mussolini, “Programma,” in Oo, vol. 17), p. 321.
20
See the comment made by Mussolini concerning war in “Il programma fascista,” Oo,
vol. 17, p. 219.
21
Mussolini, “Programma e statuti del partito nazionale fascista,” Oo, vol. 17, p. 338.
22
Mussolini, “Le linee programmatiche del partito fascista,” Oo vol. 17, p. 175.
19
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Before the March on Rome, Mussolini insisted that “Fascism sees the
nation before all else”—all else being subordinate to its interests.23 In the
formal party program of 1921, it was insisted that while the nation was
the dominant form of social organization in the contemporary world, it
was by virtue of the state, as the incarnation of the nation, “that individuals and associations of individuals in families, communes and corporate
bodies, are enhanced, developed and defended.”24
By the time Fascism had organized itself into a revolutionary movement, Panunzio had accepted all those tenets. He spoke of an emerging
“state syndicalism”—a union of a “powerful state,” revolutionary syndicalism, and developmental nationalism. Under the auspices of that state,
retrograde Italy would become a powerful nation. The state would stimulate and sustain the development of an industrial base that would render
the nation the equal of the major European powers.25 The nation, so long
humbled, would finally carve out its place in the sun.
Gone was the anarchic antistate rhetoric of his youth. Equally absent
was the individualistic, libertarian, self-governing syndicalism that gave
substance to his thought in the years before the War of Tripoli. Now
Panunzio’s syndicalism was collectivist—nationalist in content and statist
in form and in structure. The state had become the hegemonic center of his
political thought. It became the center of his system—its “ethical core.” In
the new formulation, the state was understood to be “infinitely superior”
to all its components.26
Panunzio duly identified his political thought as the modern product of
an Hegelian “metaphysics of the state.”27 By the time he collected together
the essays that made up his Lo stato fascista in 1925, Panunzio had almost
completed the transit from the positivism of Gumplowicz through the
heretical Marxism of Sorel, the vitalism of Bergson, and the critical idealism of Immanuel Kant, to the ultimate identification of Fascism with neoHegelianism.
Among the neo-Hegelians who were to shape the ideology of Fascism
was Ugo Spirito—one of the most notable students of Giovanni Gentile.
Born in 1896, in Arezzo, Southern Italy, Spirito spent most of his youth
in the provinces of Caserta and Chieti amid the poverty and backwardness
23
Mussolini, “Fatto compiuto,” Oo, vol. 17, p. 81. “The nation before all else; the nation
above all else,” “Il manifesto della nuova direzione del partito nazionale fascista,” Oo vol.
17, p. 272. Mussolini affirmed that “the nation is that to which all else must be subordinated.” “Programma,” Oo vol. 17, p. 321.
24
Mussolini, “Programma e statuti del partito nazionale fascista,” Oo vol. 17, p. 219.
25
Sergio Panunzio, Che cos’è il fascismo, pp. 19, 21, 23–25, 53; Panunzio, Lo stato
fascista (Bologna: Cappelli, 1925), pp. 36–37, 47, 59, 66–67.
26
Panunzio, Lo stato fascista, pp. 92, 95, 134, 165.
27
Ibid., pp. 66–67, 71, 80, 85.
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that typified the region. In 1914, at eighteen, he began his university studies. He was born, he affirmed later, in a revolutionary epoch—in a period
in which the inherited old order was being rapidly transformed. He reminded his readers that the dramatic changes of the period were accompanied by equally dramatic changes in patterns of thought.
The “scientistic” positivism of the first years of the new century had
very quickly succeeded in overwhelming virtually all philosophical speculation during a time that witnessed the first signs of sustained industrial
growth and development on the peninsula. Caught up in practical concerns, everyone became, in some measure, scientistic, positivistic. He recalled that Roman Catholic modernists were as much positivists as were
revolutionary Marxists. In that company, Spirito began his intellectual
itinerary as much a positivist as anyone.28
Only in 1918, at the University of Rome and under the influence of
Gentile, did Spirito find himself drawn to the “new idealism” that had
gradually come to dominate Italian thought. By that time, Gentile had
already achieved notable status among Italy’s philosophical luminaries.
An associate of Benedetto Croce, he had, by the end of the First World
War, distinguished himself in his own right. By 1918, Actualism had all
but fully taken shape.
In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, Gentile had become
an “interventionist”—advocating Italy’s entry into the conflict against the
Central Powers. He published extensively in the political journals and
nationalist newspapers of the time,29 and his ideas were well known
among the members of the Associazione nazionalista as well as among
individual revolutionary syndicalists. By the end of the Great War, the
substance of Gentile’s philosophical and political thought was available.30
After 1918, under Gentile’s influence, Spirito covered the distance from
his initial positivism to neo-Hegelianism—in very much the same sequence as had Panunzio and Mussolini—and almost immediately thereafter entered the ranks of Fascist intellectuals.31 Years later, Spirito averred
28
Ugo Spirito, Memorie di un incosciente (Milan: Rusconi, 1977), chap. 1.
Most of Gentile’s articles written during the First World War were collected in Guerra
e fede (Rome: De Alberti, 1927); and Dopo la vittoria: Nuovi frammenti politici (Rome: La
Voce, 1920).
30
By the end of the First World War, some of Gentile’s major works had already been
published. They included Scuola e filosofia (Palermo: Sandron, 1908); the two volumes of
Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica (Bari: Laterza, vol. 1 1913, and vol. 2 1914);
I fondamenti della filosofia del diritto (Laterza: Bari, 1924); Teoria generale dello spirito
come atto puro (Laterza: Bari, 1924); and Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere, 2
vols. (Pisa: Spoerri, 1917).
31
By 1923, after Gentile formally entered the Partito nazionale fascista, Spirito participated in Gentile’s intellectual and political activities that culminated in his adherence to the
Istituto nazionale fascista di cultura that both Gentile and Mussolini conceived a critical
29
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that by 1922 he had acceded to Fascism via the Actualist thought of Gentile—and had remained an unqualified adherent—for at least a decade
thereafter. For Spirito, one could comprehend Fascism’s ideal commitments only by understanding something of the “actual” idealism of Giovanni Gentile.32
Spirito, as a disciple of Gentilean Actualism, was to serve as one of
Fascism’s most gifted spokesmen. He was to join the ranks of talented
intellectuals, such as Curzio Malaparte,33 who were to give expression to
the complex thought that animated and sustained the “Regime.”
Spirito had published his first major philosophical work in 1921, Il
pragmatismo nella filosofia contemporanea34—clearly an expression of
Actualist convictions. In that work he dealt with pragmatism as a body
of thought, largely the product of activists, voluntarists, and antipositivists who, in Spirito’s judgment, shared meaningful affinities with the
thought of Gentile. In that sense, he was reflecting, in part, something
essential about Fascism’s own intellectual evolution. Fascism early displayed acknowledged affinities with generic pragmatism and Bergsonianism—bodies of thought that moved Fascism from socialist materialism to
political, epistemological, and perhaps ontological idealism.
Spirito traced the development of general epistemology from the first
suggestions that human activity intrinsically influenced the character of
knowing on the part of the perceiving subject to be found in the empiricism of Francis Bacon and John Locke; to the intimations of “subjectivism” and philosophical idealism that progressively developed in the
thought of David Hume and George Berkeley; to ultimately identify the
role of the knowing subject in the epistemological idealism of Immanuel
Kant, F. H. Bradley, and J. H. Green. Spirito, as we shall see, held knowledge to be a product of the intervention of the cognizing self in the process.
In his judgment, the pragmatists of his time said nothing less.35
For Spirito, pragmatism was a kind of halfway house for modern idealism. Pragmatists, in general, were prepared to grant that human beings,
per se, contributed in fundamental fashion to the process of coming to
know. In some intelligible sense, “man was the measure of all things,”36
an elliptical expression of the conviction that there are no “objective”
instrument in the formation of the political consciousness of Italians. See Gisella Longo,
“L’Istituto nazionale fascista di cultura”: Gli intellettuali tra partito e regime (Rome: Pellicani, 2000), passim.
32
See Sergio Zavoli, Nascita di una dittatura (Turin: SEI, 1973), pp. 192–98.
33
For the relevant work of Malaparte, see Curzio Malaparte, L’Europa vivente e altri
saggi politici (1921–1931) (Florence: Vallecchi, 1961).
34
Florence: Vallecchi, 1921.
35
Ibid., chap. 1.
36
Ibid., p. 15.
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truths, if “objective” was understood to mean that human senses, sentiment, values, judgments, conceptualization, interests, and will had nothing to do with its determination. That kind of purported “truth” would
be dogmatic—inflexibly affirmed—for which intersubjective certification
could not possibly be forthcoming. That sort of “truth” required a commitment to a form of abstract intellectualism37 to which Actualism, and
Spirito as its spokesman, objected in principle.38
By 1923, during the course of the Fascist revolution, Ugo Spirito became Gentile’s most articulate spokesman in Italy.39 In his exposition of
Gentile’s thought, its implications became increasingly apparent. By that
time, Italian Fascism had carefully distinguished itself from the social and
philosophical materialism of the Leninism40 that had swept to power in
what had been czarist Russia.
Spirito, like all Actualists, objected to any epistemology that conceived
the world in dualistic fashion: as a fixed and finished “law-governed nature,” which human consciousness simply encountered. Spirito, like Gentile,41 was opposed to a “materialism” that imagined that there was an
“objective world” outside of human consciousness that awaited discovery. The dualism of matter and consciousness that was a by-product of a
primitive “commonsensical” epistemology was rejected.
37
“We can . . . define intellectualism as the conception of a reality which is intended as
the opposite, and nothing but the opposite, of mind. If mind has such independent reality
confronting it, it can only know it by presupposing it already realized, and therefore by
limiting itself to the role of simple spectator.” Giovanni Gentile, Teoria generale dello spirito
come atto puro (Laterza: Bari, 1924), p. 222; see “The classical conception [of philosophy]
is intellectualistic: it presupposes that thought has before it a reality with which it enters
into rapport . . . an antecedent reality . . . which devours it, to remain alone and infinite.
[What] results is materialism. Intellectualism can result in nothing else.” Gentile, “Politica
e filosofia,” p. 40.
38
An “intellectualistic” epistemology is one that conceives “facts” as “absolutely objective”—as passively “observed” by the perceiving subject. See Gentile, “Politica e filosofia,”
pp. 38–39, and for Spirito’s further allusions to “intellectualism,” see Ugo Spirito, Il pragmatismo nella filosofia contemporani (Florence: Vallechi, 1921), pp. 45, 50–51, 67, 73, 87–
88, 106–19, 122, 131–32, 150, 158–59, 168. “A dogma is an affirmation that not only has
never been confirmed [proven], but which, by definition, excludes any possible confirmation.” P. 184. Spirito approved of pragmatism because, in his judgment, it was anti-intellectualist, pp. 50–51.
39
Ugo Spirito, “Giovanni Gentile” (written in 1923), L’Idealismo italiano e i suoi critici
(Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1930), pp. 39–57.
40
It is manifestly clear that Spirito entertained significant distinctions between the general
epistemology, ontology and political philosophy of Karl Marx and that of V. I. Lenin and
Josef Stalin—the latter compromised the former through the tactical and strategic necessities
of surviving in the modern world. See the discussion in Ugo Spirito, La filosofia del comunismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1947), particularly pp. 18–20.
41
See Gentile’s comments in Giovanni Gentile, La riforma dell’educazione: Discorsi ai
maestri di Trieste, 5th ed. (1919; Florence: Sansoni, 1955), chap. 4.
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Spirito, like Gentile, rejected the intellectualistic conviction that there
could be a “reality,” a “nature,” antecedent to knowing—a reality that
could only be detected through human sensations, sensations that somehow “reflected” the properties of that “external and material” nature.
Actualism rejected such notions—and held that, under the conditions envisioned by materialists, any such external reality could only be, like
Kant’s noumena, essentially unknowable. It would constitute a philosophical absurdity.42 Given that assessment, all forms of epistemological
and ontological materialism were summarily dismissed as forms of sterile
“intellectualism.”43
Like Gentile, Spirito argued that the act of thinking, spiritual awareness
itself, must somehow encompass, within itself, all truth values and moral
enjoinments. Like Gentile, the young Spirito was an absolute idealist—
who began with an elementary awareness out of which thinking (pensiero
pensante) would “dialectically” generate the categories that would give
descriptive and normative form to “reality.”44
Rejecting the presupposition of ontological realists—who attempt to
fashion reality out of a suppositious relationship of individual subjects
interacting with external objects—Spirito characterized “reality” as pensiero pensate, as something thought, a product of collective thinking. In
effect, he sought (as did Gentile) to render reality “concrete”—as a form
of collective consciousness. For Spirito, the very notion that one might
coherently speak of an objective reality independent of collective reasoning was cognitively meaningless. For Actualists, reality could only be a
product of the reasoning of a thinking community. The evidence for any
reality, whatever, could only be given as part of a shared consciousness—
immanent in collective consciousness itself. To speak of a reality that was
independent of and/or antecedent to such consciousness could only involve (“intellectualistic,” i.e., dogmatic) presuppositions that were epistemologically indefensible.
Clearly, the talk of a reality independent of a collective consciousness
was recognized as methodologically useful for the various empirical sciences. The pragmatists of the period had established that reasonably well.
Spirito’s point, like that of Gentile, was that whatever intellectual strategy
42
See the discussion in Ugo Spirito, “Giovanni Gentile,” L’Idealismo italiano, pp. 42–43.
Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, Leninist thinkers attempted to defend the
epistemological and ontological materialism of V. I. Lenin. See the discussion in A. James
Gregor, A Survey of Marxism: Problems in Philosophy and the Theory of History (New
York: Random House, 1965), chap. 3. Gentile did not attribute that form of epistemological
materialism (or realism) to Marx. See Gentile’s discussion in Gentile, “La filosofia della
prassi,” in I fondamenti della filosofia del diritto (Florence: Sansoni, 1955), pp. 205–19.
44
Spirito, “Giovanni Gentile,” pp. 44–45.
43
O U T L I N E S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
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might prove useful need not be true nor philosophically defensible—and
might have entirely negative moral implications for human actors.
It was eminently clear to Spirito that all the categories that informed
the empirical sciences were ultimately subjective, and inescapably dependent on some kind of analytic process intrinsic to interactive thinking
itself—rather than the consequence of individual responses to some reality independent of mind.45 Human judgment, choices, criteria, and purpose gave substance to scientific description, the assessment of probabilities, the categorization of subject matter, and the complex theoretical
constructs of standard inquiry. There could be no “reality” independent
of consciousness.
While Spirito recognized the practical purposes of empirical science,
he insisted that such “abstract” sciences, once “concretely” considered,
however otherwise useful, could no longer serve as a philosophical rationale for determinism and amorality. For Spirito, the sciences were the
products of shared reflection— as consciousness or “spirit”—parsed into
useful, but ever-changing, dynamic categories. To pretend that science
was composed of individually perceived “pictures” of a mind-independent reality was cognitively unintelligible46 and proved to be morally repugnant. That had become eminently clear with the recognition that “realists” and “materialists” could only speak, counterintuitively, of the
reality of the world in terms of a “matter” having no objective properties
whatever47—as well as being entirely devoid of anything that might be
instructive in terms of individual human morality.48
The categories that provide descriptive content to the individual sciences constitute the “abstract logic” of ordinary knowing—the “concreteness” of which is to be found in the activity of the “transcendental self,”
that conscious, collective self that is the communal source not only of
comprehensive knowing, but of moral principles as well. Spirito, like Gentile, argued that the criteria employed in the generation of categories, as
well as those invoked to establish their truth, are the result of an array of
individual human decisions made in the course of shared reflection —
rendering every human judgment a moral choice. Both Gentile and Spirito
argued that the most fundamental human experiences reveal the totalitarian complexity of immediate consciousnesses. Concrete thinking distinguishes itself radically from the “things” that emerge upon reflection. Immanent in thinking itself is its complexity, a dialectical complexity that
45
Ibid., pp. 47–48.
Spirito, Il pragmatismo, p. 31.
47
Ibid., p. 64.
48
See the discussion in Gentile, Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro, chap. 15;
and compare Spirito, Il pragmatismo, p. 29.
46
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requires other “things” and other “spirits” in order to actively proceed.
Those things and other persons are immanent in thinking and essential
to morality.
Gentilean idealism conceived the “absolute self” to be the unity out of
which all scientific and moral diversity arises.49 It is the act of thinking
out of which all particularity emerges. Thinking (pensiero pensante) is
collective—universal in essence. Concrete consciousness, spiritituality,
per se, knows no limits, no restrictions. It is truly presuppositionless—
and thus ceases to be the thinking of the empirical self of naturalistic
psychology. Thinking, in its ultimate reality, involves action that resolves
everything into itself—and therefore implies a more profound or collective self than that of the immediate individual. It involves a “profound”
self, which recognizes all other thinking selves as at once other—while
yet one with itself. Those “other selves,” however they are metaphysically
or ontologically conceived, provide us the simple and complex empirical
“facts” that constitute some of the principal elements of our “concrete”
thinking—the thinking of our greater self.50
Spirito, as a consequence of this conception of the transcendental or
profound self, identified ethics as the critical center of Actualism. Without
others, there could be no confirmed truths—and without others there
would be no ethics or applied morality. Recognizing a community of
“other selves” as critical to thinking renders not only truth, but interpersonal morality, central to Actualist thought.51
Gentile often referred to other selves as essential to moral maturation,
to the universality that ethics requires of the initial finite self. “When we
look within our own consciousness and consider the value of what we are
doing and of what we are saying to ourselves, it is as though innumerable
eyes were looking in upon us as judges. . . . We are not a pure theoretical
experience. And therefore our world is peopled with other minds, with
other persons.” In the concrete reality of “dialectical development,” the
finite, empirical self, in truth and morality, reveals itself as a “transcendental ‘we.’ ”52
What appears to be clear in the Actualism of both Spirito and Gentile
is a notion that other selves are critical to the actualization (autoctisi)
of the self. The Actualist concept of the transcendental self provides the
49
See the account in Gentile, Teoria generale dello spirito come atto pure, chaps. 17 and
18. Chapter 18 was added to the later editions of the Teoria generale. The discussion of the
“self-development” of the “transcendental self” is found prominently in Gentile, Sistema di
logica come teoria del conoscere (Florence: Sansoni, 1942), vol. 2, chap. 5.
50
See the entire discussion of Spirito, L’Idealismo italiano e i suoi critici, pp. 55–57.
51
Ibid., pp. 54–55.
52
Gentile, Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro, pp. 32–33, 37.
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unmistakable essentials of a social conception of truth and an Actualist
political ethics.
Long before the advent of Fascism—as early as the second decade of
the twentieth century—Actualism had already argued that the individual
self of liberal political thought was “unreal,” in some significant senses a
fiction. For Gentile and Spirito, the multiplicity of selves, understood by
liberalism to be the foundation of politics, was not a common sum, but
a transcendental community. Political liberalism mistakingly regarded the
empirical selves as “true” selves—and dismissed the communal self,
“which alone is the true subject of our experience and therefore the only
true self.”53
The Actualist conception of the communal “true” self, which identified
itself with the state as the executive expression of the political community,
was to become the normative rationale for Fascist totalitarianism. It was
to displace the insistent individualism that characterized political liberalism since its emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The notion of the Hegelian “more profound self”—in which the “narrow” empirical individual was identified—was incorporated into Fascism’s rationale as an identification of the ordinary individual, as political
subject, with the inclusive, unitary will of the historic community. It was
a philosophical notion that abandoned the libertarian individualism of
“bourgeois democracy” for a form of collectivism in which empirical individuals identified with a “larger,” more profound self. Within the reflections of Gentilean Actualism, the ordinary individual of political liberalism had become more and more “abstract” and unreal over time,
achieving “concreteness” only in the neo-Hegelian analysis of the empirical individual’s boundless communion with others in society and the state.
The Actualist identification of the individual of common sense with the
political state was to serve as the linchpin of Fascist corporativism and
totalitarianism—the economic and political system articulated to unite
all citizens in that enterprise committed to the rapid and comprehensive
economic development of the retrograde Italian peninsula. In that process, Spirito was to emphasize the functional utility of the moral and pedagogical quality of Actualism, a quality that made of the interaction of
persons the occasion of “love and spiritual communion” even when separated by differences. Differences with others were not conceived obstacles
to self-articulation or commitments to collective mission.
For Actualists, at the foundation of the empirical self is a more profound self “that knows no plurality.”54 Real and imagined differences can,
and must, be overcome if self-development is to proceed and mission re53
54
Ibid., p. 30.
Spirito, L’Idealismo italiano e i suoi critici, p. 56; see the discussion in chap. 8.
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sponsibilities are to be discharged.55 Implicit in such formulations is the
seamless identification of the individuals of common sense with the revolutionary and developmental will of the totalitarian state.
Actualism argued that human beings achieve the fullness of self through
a process of self-actualization—involving exchanges with others and
against things in the course of establishing truth and fulfilling responsibilities. In that sense, interaction with others was an essential part of the
enterprise. Nationalists and syndicalists themselves had both identified
the consuming developmental responsibilities of the revolutionary state
with the occasion for truth determination and the self-actualization of
individuals.
It was in that context that, as early as 1920, Gentile argued that labor,
in general, constituted one of those special forms of interactive spiritual
activity through which human beings shaped themselves.56 It was a conviction that was to significantly influence the subsequent work of Ugo
Spirito. Out of those convictions, the work of Spirito as a corporativist
theorist was to take on form. It demonstrably reduced the doctrinal distance, already diminished, between Actualists, national syndicalists, and
the nationalists of the Associazione nazionalista.
By the beginning of 1925, the Fascism that had acceded to power in
October 1922 transformed itself into the “Regime” with which historians
have identified it ever since. Its animating doctrine became specific insofar
as it manifested itself in institutions.
While the program of the Partito nazionale fascista of 1921 anticipated
“reducing the state to the essential functions of political and juridical
order,”57 by 1925 Mussolini spoke, without qualification, of the necessity
of marshaling all the forces of the nation into the overarching unity of one
single state solidarity that represented the collective “totalitarian will” of
Fascism.58 What had transpired in the interim is relatively easy to trace.
Actualism had given the substance of its ideas to Mussolini’s Fascism.
How that had come about is equally transparent.
On 10 June 1924, individual Fascists kidnapped a socialist member of
the lower house of the Italian parliament who had been extremely critical
of Mussolini, in particular, and of Fascists, in general. Almost immediately, it was feared that he had been murdered. Eight weeks later his body
55
This was the central argument of Gentile’s pedagogical writings. See the entire discussion in La Reforma dell’educazione: Discorsi ai maestri di Trieste (1920; reprint, Florence:
Sansoni, 1955).
56
Giovanni Gentile, Discorsi di religione 3rd ed. (Florence: Sansoni, 1955), p. 26.
57
“Programma del PNF (1921),” in Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il fascista: La conquista
del potere, 1921–1925) (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), p. 756.
58
See Mussolini, “58 Riunione del Gran Consiglio del Fascismo,” and “Intransigenza
assoluta,” in Oo, vol. 21, pp. 250–51, 362.
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was discovered. There was palpable revulsion on the part of Italians everywhere on the peninsula—and the regime descended into immediate crisis.
For a time it appeared that Mussolini might be compelled to resign, precipitating the restoration of the “old order.”59
Only on 3 January 1925 did Mussolini feel secure enough to denounce
those who had called, six months before, for his dismissal and the suppression of Fascism. He announced, without equivocation, that Fascism, as a
government, and as a party, was in complete and effective control of the
nation. Fascism sought to give “the peace, the tranquility and the opportunity to return to labor that the people sought—with love if possible, or
with force, if necessary.”60 Thereafter, neither Mussolini nor Fascism
spoke of any accommodation with the elements of the former system. The
talk, thereafter, was of the totalitarian, corporative, and ethical state—
the final collectivist synthesis of nationalism, syndicalism, and Actualism.
It was at that juncture that the Actualism of Spirito took on the special
character that was to shape the subsequent history of Fascism. After 1925,
it became evident that Mussolini sought to institutionalize the totalitarian
and ethical state anticipated by Giovanni Gentile years before. After
1925, there was to be no further talk of an individualistic “Manchestrian”
state—a limited state performing only ancillary functions for the nation.61
Mussolini had always been an astute politician. He had been a gifted
tactician, a recognized “tempista,” one who could calculate probabilities
of success in given political circumstances. Throughout the preliminary
stages of the revolution, those talents served him well. During that period,
he had gathered around himself a collection of representatives of sometimes conflicting interests. There were syndicalists preoccupied with the
well-being of their organizations; there were industrialists concerned with
their individual and collective business interests; there were landowners
and tenant farmers, each group pursuing its own real or conceived interests. All these groups were to be drawn into the vortex of events during
the years of civil strife and revolutionary activity that preceded Fascism’s
ascent to power.
In those circumstances, tactical compromise became critical to the strategy of success. Even the seizure of power had been a compromise between
the Blackshirt squads, the king, his conservative counselors, intellectuals,
59
See the account in De Felice, Mussolini il fascista, La conquista del potere 1921–1925,
chap. 7.
60
Mussolini, “Discorso del 3 Gennaio,” in Oo, vol. 21, p. 240.
61
In the Fascist party program of 1921, the state was to be “reduced to its essential
political and juridical functions” in defense of the “autonomous values of individuals and
associated individuals that are expressed in the form of collective persons (families, communes, corporations, etc.).” Renzo De Felice, “Programma del PNF (1921),” in Mussolini
il fascista, La conquista del potere, 1921–1925, p. 756.
100
CHAPTER FIVE
and the parliament composed of as many political democrats and liberals
as anti-Fascist socialists. What distinguished Mussolini from the politicians who had practiced compromisory strategies since the establishment
of the new Italian state in the nineteenth century was his continued investment in a collection of doctrinal commitments that resurfaced in his overt
behavior whenever conditions permitted.
To anyone who knew anything about Mussolini, it was clear that there
was very little that was conservative, liberal, or politically democratic
about his most fundamental convictions. Through all the phases of his
political apprenticeship, Mussolini had always been an elitist, as well as
a singularly antidemocratic revolutionary. By the beginning of 1925, the
liberals, together with the advocates of political democracy, had either
fallen away or reinterpreted their convictions in order to render them
compatible with those given expression by Mussolini on 3 January 1925.
For a brief period of time during the mobilization of the movement
and immediately after his accession to power, Mussolini advocated liberal
economic policies—opposing state interference in the productive process.
The advocacy of a strong state was central to Fascism’s prospective domestic political policy, but together with that advocacy was a general commitment to noninterference by the state in economic matters. In 1921, the
Fascist program held that Fascist economic policy was essentially liberal—that “in economic matters, we are liberal.”62
Such a programmatic position appeared counterintuitive. One would
expect a “strong” state to be prepared to intervene in the national economy whenever it chose. Why Mussolini chose such a stance can be reconstructed with a measure of confidence.
At the very core of Fascist beliefs was the certainty that Italy required
rapid economic growth and industrial development if it were to survive
and prevail in the twentieth century. At the same time, Mussolini became
increasingly aware of the massive economic and industrial failures that
stalked the Bolshevik revolution. By 1922, the world had witnessed the
catastrophic collapse of the Russian economy,63 a reality that could only
influence Mussolini’s judgments concerning the efficacy of state intervention in the productive process.64 He had followed the revolution in Russia
with particular application and was convinced that its failures were object
lessons for revolutionaries everywhere. That, together with some early
influences that recommended “free enterprise” arrangements as instrumental to rapid industrial growth, led Mussolini to maintain that Fas62
Mussolini, “Il programma fascista,” in Oo vol. 17, p. 220.
Mussolini, “Quando il mito tramonta,” in Oo vol. 17, pp. 323–25.
64
See, for example, Mussolini, “Il fascismo nel 1921,” in Oo, vol. 16, pp. 101–3.
63
O U T L I N E S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
101
cism’s developmental program anticipated a decentralized65 “Manchestrian state” for the peninsula—reducing the state’s function to the
protection of its citizens through a well-organized and provisioned police
force, a military for the defense against foreign aggression, and the formulation of a foreign policy that would serve the national interests.
Divested of its economic functions, the state would serve rapid economic development by maintaining discipline in the nation and order
among the factors of production. “The state must maintain all imaginable
possible controls,” Mussolini maintained, “but it must renounce every
form of economic management.”66
The devastating consequences of the Bolshevik policy of “war communism”—with its state dominance of the economy—reinforced the liberal
economic policy suggestions that were commonplace among Italian syndicalists. Before his death in the First World War, for example, Filippo Corridoni, a revolutionary syndicalist and an intimate of Mussolini, had argued
that Italy was an underdeveloped nation with an economy still in its
“swaddling clothes.” If Italy was to discharge its historic and revolutionary functions, he continued, it would have to develop its economy very
rapidly to produce a requisite revolutionary proletarian majority, and an
economy capable of offsetting the influence of its international “plutocratic” opponents—who saw in less-developed nations their legitimate
prey. Less-developed nations that had entered late into the process of industrial and technological development would otherwise remain forever
the victims of the advanced industrial powers.67
To avoid that doleful prospect, Corridoni advocated an unqualified
commitment to liberal and free-trade policies: the protection of infant
domestic industries, and a complete withdrawal of state influence in the
productive processes of the nation.68 The rapid economic growth and development would provide those financial and military capabilities that
would not only protect the nation from predation, but it would also create
the preconditions for its revolutionary renewal.
The realities of the devastation state dominance of the economy had
brought to Bolshevik Russia, together with the insights of Italian syndical65
Mussolini, “Il programma fascista,” in Oo vol. 17, p. 218.
Mussolini, “Il fascismo nel 1921,” in Oo, vol. 16, p. 101.
67
Filippo Corridoni, Sindacalismo e repubblica (1915; reprint, Rome; Bibliotechina sociale, 1945), pp. 19, 22–23, 25, 32–33, 41, 48–49, 55–56, 82, 110–11. See the account in
Ivon De Begnac, L’Arcangelo sindacalista (Filippo Corridoni) (Verona: Mondadori, 1943),
chap. 32; and Vito Rastelli, Filippo Corridoni: La figura storica e la dottrina politica (Rome
Conquiste d’impero, 1940), chaps. 1–3.
68
Corridoni, Sindacalismo e repubblica, pp. 57, 75, 80–81, 86, 88, 91–93. For a more
substantial discussion of the thought of Corridoni, see Gennaro Malgieri, “Il ’sindacalismo
eroico,’ di Filippo Corridoni,” Rivista di studi corporativi 17, nos. 3–6 (September–December 1987), pp. 607–37.
66
102
CHAPTER FIVE
ists, led Mussolini initially to propose laissez-faire economic policies for
a Fascist Italy. That attracted the support from those classical liberal economists who saw only calamity in the intended policies of revolutionary
Marxism.
Both Vilfredo Pareto and Maffeo Pantaleoni gravitated into the orbit
of Fascism because both, as essentially free-market economists, saw merit
in Fascism’s opposition to socialism and Marxist economics.69 Pantaleoni
argued that, in his judgment, Mussolini was among the most serious economic “Manchestrians” that had ever served in the Italian parliament.70
With the advent of Fascism to power, serving with distinction in a commission under the administration of Alberto de’Stefani—organized to reform
the nation’s tax and financial system—Pantaleoni maintained that Mussolini’s anti-Marxist revolutionary intervention in the nation’s politics had
saved Italy from following Bolshevik Russia into economic chaos.71
Pareto’s relationship to Fascism was very similar. There is not the
slightest doubt that Pareto was an advocate of the free market in the
governance of a nation’s economy.72 He opposed “statism,” because interventions of the state, he maintained, tended to corrupt, dissipate incentive, reduce competition and bureaucratize enterprise.73 On the other
hand, he considered “economic liberty” uniquely capable of “producing
vast increments of wealth.”74 His support of Fascism (which he served
as delegate to the League of Nations, and for which he wrote three articles for its theoretical journal, Gerarchia)75 was predicated on the conviction that the movement had saved Italy from a descent into anarchy and
counterproductive socialism.76
69
Pareto is counted among the precursors of Fascism by Werner Stark, “In Search of the
True Pareto,” British Journal of Sociology 14 (1963), pp. 103–12; Ellsworth Faris, “An
Estimate of Pareto,” American Journal of Sociology 41 (1936), p. 657; James W. Vander
Zanden, “Pareto and Fascism Reconsidered,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 19, no. 4 (July 1960), pp. 409–11.
70
Maffeo Pantaleoni, Bolshevismo italiano (Bari: Laterza, 1922), pp. 212–13.
71
See Alberto de’Stefani, La restaurazione finanziaria: I risultati ’impossibili’ della parsimonia (Rome; Volpe, 1978), pp. vii–viii xxiii, and xxx.
72
See Piet Tommissen, “L’Apport de Pareto a la science economique,” Nouvelle ecole 36
(July 1981), pp. 41–56.
73
See, for example, Vilfredo Pareto, Corso di economia politica (Turin Einaudi, 1949),
vol. 2, paras. 682, 837, 998, n. l, and “Lasciate fare, lasciate passare,” Scritti politici (Turin:
UTET, 1974), p. 457. In this context, consult Giovanni Busino’s comments in “Introduction
to Vilfredo Pareto,” I sistemi socialisti (Turin: UTET, 1974), p. 29.
74
Pareto, “Stato etico,” in Scritti politici, vol. 1, p. 758.
75
See Paola Maria Arcari, Introduction to Socialismo e democrazia nel pensiero di Vilfredo Pareto (Rome: Volpe, 1966), pp. 5–35.
76
See the discussion in Luigi Montini, Vilfredo Pareto e il fascismo (Rome: Volpe, 1974),
introduction and chap. 1.
O U T L I N E S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
103
Neither Pareto nor Pantaleoni were Fascists per se. They both saw merit
in some of its policies. Equally clear was Pareto’s conviction that Fascism
would enjoy only a brief tenure. He conceived Mussolini’s regime as transitional, ultimately to act as an agent for one of restored individual liberty
and for a market-based economy.77 A strong state would be necessary only
to carry the nation through a troubled transit from the postwar period to
the subsequent liberal arrangement. Pareto had made evident his suspicions of any proposed intrusive and presumably omnicompetent state.78
We know that Mussolini had been influenced by Pareto’s thought; he
was certainly familiar with his writings. He attended Pareto’s lectures in
Lausanne—and he reviewed his books for socialist journals. Granted that
the scope of Pareto’s reflections was so vast and inclusive, it is difficult to
identify with any precision those elements that exercised most influence
on the youthful Mussolini. Nonetheless, Mussolini welcomed Pareto’s
support because Fascism’s immediate program found confirmation in the
views of the “prince of economists.”79
Acknowledging all that, what is clear is that during the first years of
Fascist mobilization, many of those intellectuals that would help shape its
ideology remained uncertain as to which developmental strategies most
recommended themselves. Alfredo Rocco, for example, while an advocate
of a strong state, was initially convinced, nonetheless, that a liberal economic policy “undeniably fostered the maximum utilization of the forces
of production.”80 Sergio Panunzio, in 1919, equally committed to the creation of a strong state for the peninsula, similarly conceived liberal economic modalities as most conducive to rapid economic growth and industrial development.
At that time, as a national syndicalist, Panunzio maintained that neither
the productive system of the Italian peninsula nor the consciousness of its
workers was sufficiently mature to recommend either the abolition of private property or the collective control of production.81 Unprepared for the
77
See the informed discussion of Piet Tommissen, “Vilfredo Pareto und der italienische
Faschismus,” in Ernst Forsthoof and Reinhard Hoerstel, eds., Standorte im Zeitstrom (n.p.:
Athenaeum, 1975), pp. 365–91, particularly pp. 375–79.
78
“Beginning with state monopolies, one proceeds to the obligatory organization of
labor [sindacati obbligatori] . . . [then] the collective organization of production . . . the
destruction of every individual initiative, the annihilation of every human dignity as well as
the reduction of human beings to the level of a herd of rams.” Pareto, Corso di economia
politica, para. 998 n. 1.
79
Mussolini, “Il pensiero di Mussolini sulla crisi ministeriale,” in Oo, vol. 18, p. 37 and
“All’Università Bocconi,” in Oo, 21, p. 100.
80
Alfredo Rocco, “Il principio economico della nazione,” Scriti e discorsi politici (Milan:
Giuffre, 1938), vol. 2, p. 718.
81
Panunzio, “Un programma d’azione,” Il Rinnovamento 1, no. 2 (15 March 1919), pp.
83–89; see his comments in Che cos’è il fascismo, pp. 24–25.
104
CHAPTER FIVE
revolution heralded by Marxism, the revolution in economically retrograde Italy could only support a “revolutionary conservatism,” characterized by “a very strong state—a veritable Leviathan”82—that would provide
disciplined order and stability, coupled with a market-governed economy,
within which the industrial production of underdeveloped Italy might
flourish.83 If the “young, proletarian nation” was to both mature and become a major international power capable of protecting itself against foreign plutocracies, it required the discipline of labor and the marshaling of
resources, which only a strong and goal-inspired state might provide.84 As
late as 1924, Panunzio held that the state should be strong, but not necessarily deal administratively with the economy. Fascism, he insisted at the
time, was essentially a political, and not an economic, doctrine.85 During
Fascism’s first years in power, Mussolini recognized the merits of just such
contentions. He had witnessed the magnitude of the economic failure of
Bolshevism—and its recourse to free-market alternatives in the search for
solutions. Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), with its unmistakable capitalist features, was pressed into service in the effort to restart the economy
of Bolshevik Russia.86 That strongly suggested that the principles of a free
market economy still had some relevance for the contemporary world—as
well as for revolutionary Italy.
That capitalism had not yet exhausted its “historic function” was anything but a “reactionary” and venal abandonment of socialism—it was
recognition of an evident reality.87 Mussolini had early, and consistently,
maintained that he would pursue any economic policy that promised to
maximize, and render more sophisticated, the material productivity of the
nation. That was the commitment—it did not entail any allegiance to
some specific means for its accomplishment.88
In the years immediately following the March on Rome, a liberal economic policy contributed to the rapid stabilization and expansion of the
Italian economy. With the suppression of disorder and labor stoppages,
the economy commenced a rate of growth that distinguished it among the
economies of Europe.
82
Panunzio, “Per lo stato forte,” Giornale di Roma, 13 May 1923, reprinted in Stato
nazionale e sindacati (Milan: Imperia, 1924), pp. 94, 164–67.
83
See Panunzio, Che cos’è il fascismo, pp. 28–29, 68, 72; and Lo stato fascista, p. 92, and
his discussion concerning modernization and industrialization in “Contro il regionalismo,”
Critica sociale 1, nos. 17–18 (16 September–1 October 1921), reprinted in Stato nazionale
e sindacati, pp. 85–86.
84
Panunzio, Stato nazionale e sindacati, pp. 108–9.
85
See Panunzio, Lo stato fascista, pp. 134, 159.
86
See Mussolini’s comments in “Dove impera Lenin,” in Oo vol. 17, p. 78; “Punti
fermi,” in Oo vol. 17, p. 207.
87
Mussolini, “Segni del tempo,” in Oo vol. 17, pp. 17–18; and “Tiro a segno,” in Oo
vol. 17, p. 249.
88
Mussolini, “Discorso di Cremona,” in Oo, vol. 15, p. 186.
O U T L I N E S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
105
All that notwithstanding, Fascist policy, as its doctrine recommended,
was a function of deliberation concerning policies best calculated to further the general interests of the nation. As a consequence—irrespective of
its initial presumption in favor of liberal economic strategies—at the end
of 1923, the first efforts were made that were to mature into comprehensive land reclamation and infrastructureal development that were to occupy the Fascist government for years as the Bonifica integrale (comprehensive land reclamation) and Il battaglia del grano (the Battle for Grain).
Compehensive land development, with its programs for rural training,
land reclamation, road construction, and the provision of low-cost housing, contributed to the drive to increase grain yields. The nation required
a well-developed agrarian base for its industrialization in order to avoid
capital depletion because of the costs involved in the foreign purchase of
comestibles. Together with those considerations there was the conviction
that a rural population consistently enjoyed a higher birthrate than urban
dwellers. It was a conviction—supported by considerable credible evidence—long entertained by both nationalists and Fascists.
If Italy were to become a “great power,” it required a population capable of providing sufficient workers and soldiers to sustain its efforts—and
agricultural yields that would support them. An abundant and healthy
population was a necessary precondition for greatness.
A considerable amount of social science evidence indicated that the
growth of European populations had decelerated with the urbanization
attendant on industrial development—a preamble to political, military,
and economic eclipse. Italian nationalists had warned their conationals
of such prospects even before the Great War.89 The consequence was that
Fascism came to power with the intention of sustaining and stimulating
the nation’s birthrate with a variety of incentives. Not only was a program
of comprehensive rural development undertaken, but in 1925, the Fascist
government commenced its program for the “Protection of Motherhood
and Infancy”—as collateral support for such ends. Mussolini, long before, had committed himself to just such projects.90 Corrado Gini had
made the case for state intervention in a program of population growth
before the First World War and was to subsequently make the full case
during the Fascist period.
Such programs made it evident that Fascism’s initial liberal economic
policies were contingent—not predicated on inflexible principle. Fascism
was prepared to involve the state in complex economic activities if that
89
Corrado Gini, who was to serve Fascism as a member of its constitutional reform commission and distinguish himself as an internationally celebrated statistician, published his I
fattori demografici dell’evoluzione delle nazioni (Turin: Bocca) in 1912. He identified a declining rate of population growth with the general senescence of nations; see pp. 102–7, 135.
90
See Mussolini, preface to Riccardo Korherr, Regresso delle nascite: Morte dei popoli
(Rome: Libreria del Littorio, 1928).
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CHAPTER FIVE
intervention was conceived necessary to further one or another primary
ideological commitment. Under those circumstances, as time passed, it
became more and more difficult to distinguish purely economic matters
from those that were political and the proper function of a presumptively
Manchestrian administration.
As a consequence, during the first years of the regime, conservatives
and revolutionaries, both within and outside the Fascist party, jockeyed
for positions and advantage. Under the circumstances, Fascist theoreticians often papered over tensions by maintaining that the revolution was
disposed to “conserving” whatever was of value from the past. That
seemed to satisfy the class of “fellow travelers” who imagined that Fascism would serve their conservative or liberal interests. They chose to
understand Fascism as a transitional regime, destined to restore the antecedent economically and politically liberal order.
With the murder of Matteotti in June 1924, those conservatives and
liberals who had collected around Fascism prior to the March on Rome
began to fall away. At the same time, there was a sudden erosion of equity
values. Apprehension grew among the propertied classes—many withdrew their support—and the opposition press arrayed itself against the
government. There were large-scale defections—particularly among the
business and financial communities—together with a substantial number
from the Fascist syndicates.91 To add to the mounting difficulties, the formal political opposition “seceded” from parliament in moral outrage—
and sought to mobilize the public as well as the Crown against the government. The entire system was threatened.92
As the year drew to its close, it became apparent that neither the monarchy nor the military were steadfast in their support of the Fascist government. The hemorrhaging of membership among the Fascist syndicates
continued. It became increasingly evident that either Mussolini would
have to surrender the government or embark on an alternative that could
promise more control over every aspect of domestic politics.93 Mussolini
chose the second alternative.
On 3 January 1925, Mussolini affirmed that Fascism would thereafter
control Italy; he made very clear what his intentions were. On 23 January,
the Fascist Grand Council announced that all the economic forces of the
nation would thereafter be “integrated into the life of the state.”94 Never
again would allusion be made to the minimalist “Manchestrian state.”
91
For a chronology of events during this period, see Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il fascista,
La conquista del potere, 1921–1925, chap. 7.
92
See the account ibid., chap. 7, particularly pp. 640, 666, and 677.
93
See Mussolini, “42a riunion del Gran Consiglio del fascismo,” in Oo, vol. 21, p. 23.
94
Mussolini, “58a riunione del Gran Consiglio del fascismo,” in Oo, vol. 21, p. 325.
O U T L I N E S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
107
On 5 May, Mussolini spoke of the unqualified “subordination of all to
the will of a leader” as the strategy calculated to bring glory to the nation.95 On the twenty-third he insisted that “nothing should be above
the state.”96 That June, Mussolini called for “all power to Fascism”—the
necessary correlative to its “absolute intransigence”—and its irrepressible
“totalitarian will.”97 Fascism would be totalitarian. Political idealism had
come into its own.
It had always been transparent to anyone who was minimally informed
that Fascism, as Fascism was understood by Mussolini, was ill-disposed
toward parliamentary democracy of any sort. Few of those around Mussolini—Futurists, syndicalists, or Actualists, other than some of the traditional nationalists—supported anything that might be reasonably characterized as democratic in any identifiable conservative or liberal sense.
When National Syndicalists or Actualists spoke of the state, it was without any principled commitment to the Manchestrian state of the classical
economists. Correspondingly, in the doctrinal literature of the regime, the
initial tentative period that extended from October 1922 until January
1925 is generally characterized as preliminary to the actual institutionalization of the revolutionary Fascist state.98
Only after Mussolini’s definitive address of 3 January 1925 did the
features that were to define the Fascist state receive their full articulation
and doctrinal defense. After 1925, Fascism became totalitarian. Those
who failed to identify with it were deemed to be against it.
More important still, the intellectuals who had always supported the
revolution sought, thereafter, to clearly explicate their intentions and
shape the emerging system. Among the most important work in that regard was that of Ugo Spirito. By early 1927, both he and Arnaldo Volpicelli agreed to carry Gentile’s Actualism into the applied realm of economic relations within the evolving revolutionary community created by
the Fascist accession to power in October 1922—and its readiness to
clearly define itself without equivocation by the beginning of 1925.
Less than three weeks after his address on 3 January, in which he made
his dictatorial and totalitarian intentions unequivocally clear, Mussolini
addressed the Grand Council of Fascism and spoke of “fully incorporating and organizing the economic forces of the nation into the life of the
state.”99 Four months later, Giovanni Gentile brought the results of the
95
Mussolini, “La donna e il voto,” in Oo, vol. 21, p. 305.
Mussolini, “Nulla deve essere al disopra dello stato,” in Oo, vol. 21, p. 325.
97
Mussolini, “Intransigenza assoluta,” in Oo, vol. 21, pp. 362–63.
98
See, for example, the instructive case of Paolo Orano, Il fascismo: Rivoluzione delle
camicie nere e lo stato totalitario (Rome: Pinciana, 1940), particularly “Stato e partito,”
pp. 97–126.
99
Mussolini, “58a Riunione del Gran Consiglio del fascismo,” in Oo, vol. 21, pp. 250–51.
96
108
CHAPTER FIVE
deliberations of the “Committee of Eighteen” on constitutional revision
to that same Grand Council. The issue of the relationship of the workers’
and industrialists’ organizations to the state increasingly became the focus
of attention. On 3 April, 1926, legislation was promulgated that was calculated to empower the Fascist state “to direct the national economy.”100
The law of 3 April 1926 was preliminary to the formal declaration on
21 April, 1927 of La Carta del lavoro, the Fascist Labor Charter,101 in
which Italians were informed that “the nation is an organism having ends,
life and capabilities superior to those of the individuals or groups of individuals of which it is composed. It is a moral, political and ethical unity that
finds its integral realization in the Fascist state. Work in all its forms . . . is
a social duty.” Mussolini further informed his audience that “production
. . . has one and a single object, the well-being of the individual and the
development of national power.”102 Fascism was to answer not only the
imperatives of developmental nationalism, but those of Actualism as well.
The Charter spoke of state intervention in the nation’s economy whenever “private initiative proved lacking or inadequate, or when the state’s
political interests” were involved. That intervention could take the form
of “control, assistance, or direct management.”103 In effect, the Labor
Charter revealed that the Fascist state was prepared to assume the responsibilities of the ultimate arbiter of the nation’s economic as well as its
political destiny.
In all of this, elements of the nationalism of Corradini and Rocco, as
well as the National Syndicalism of Panunzio, are clearly discernable.
Italy was to be industrialized and modernized. Both nationalists and syndicalists had early acknowledged those responsibilities.104 Giovanni Gen100
See the account of Giuseppe Bottai in his exposition of the Carta del lavoro (Rome:
Diritto del lavoro, 1928), p. 33.
101
An English language version of the Carta del lavoro may be found as an appendix to
William G. Welk, Fascist Economic Policy: An Analysis of Italy’s Economic Experiment
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), pp. 287–92.
102
“La carta del lavoro 1927,” in Atti fondamentali del fascismo (Rome: Lara, 1969), p.
7. An English translation is available as an appendix A in Fausto Pitigliani, The Italian
Corporative State (London: P. S. King and Son, 1933), p. 245.
103
Atti fondamental del fascismo, p. 10.
104
See Enrico Corradini, “Sindacalismo, nazionalismo, imperialismo,” in Discorsi politici (1902–1923) (Florence: Vallecchi, 1923), pp. 51–69; and A. O. Olivetti, “Sindacalismo
e nazionalismo: Le due realtà del pensiero contemporaneo,” Pagine libere 15 February
1911, in the typescript collection; Battaglie sindacaliste: Dal sindacalismo al fascismo, provided by Olivetti’s daughter, Livia Olivetti, pp. 60–64. By 1910, Mario Viana and Paolo
Orano had identified the same affinities. Francesco Perfetti, ed., Il nazionalismo italiano
(Rome: Il Borghese, 1969), p. 25.By 1920, Giovanni Gentile had associated Actualism with
the nationalism of Enrico Corradini and had intimated a connection with some form of
syndicalism. Spirito identified himself with the emerging synthesis that was to become the
ideology of Fascism by the end of the decade.
O U T L I N E S O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
109
tile, in turn, had identified Actualism with the dynamic self-fulfillment of
individuals by identifying them with their historic community. In substance, Actualism was to serve as the rationale that lay behind the synthesis of nationalism and syndicalism that fully emerged after 1925. By 1927,
it was Spirito who was to emphasize Actualism’s convictions concerning
the identification of the individual’s ultimate interests with Fascism’s
evolving developmental syndicalism and corporativism.
In that year, Ugo Spirito, together with Volpicelli, himself an Actualist,
assumed the editorship of the journal Nuovi studi di diritto, economica e
politica, devoted to law, economics, and politics. In its pages, Spirito and
Volpicelli sought to address the issues of syndicalism, the economic restructuring of Italian industry, and revolutionary social politics. In Nuovi
studi, Spirito was prepared to argue against the economic, antistate liberalism that had survived the Fascist March on Rome in 1922—and which
had sought thereafter to influence the policies of the regime until the political crisis of 1924 and 1925.
By the end of the decade of the 1920s, Spirito had begun to apply Actualist principles to the study of developmental economics that more and
more systematically occupied Fascist intellectuals. In 1930, Spirito published his La critica dell’economia liberale, and in August 1931 received
acknowledgment from Mussolini, who had read the volume and applauded its contents.105 Spirito’s I fondamenti dell’economia corporativa106 followed in 1932 and then it was followed, almost immediately,
by Capitalismo e corporativismo,107 an amplified account of his communication before the Second Congress of Syndicalist and Corporativist Studies held in Ferrara in May 1932.
In the decade between the Fascist March on Rome and the Second Congress of Syndicalist and Corporativist Studies, syndicalism had completed
its transition from the antistate, antinationalist, antimilitary, anarchic, libertarian, and exclusively workingmen’s doctrine into one supporting organizations composed of both workingmen and entrepreneurs serving essentially as agents of the developmental Fascist state. As early as October
1925, about two months before the political crisis that followed the murder of Matteotti was resolved in his affirmation of control, Mussolini
spoke of Fascist syndicalism as a system that celebrated the “obedience
in silence of disciplined labor”—and insisted upon labor’s “discharge of
duties before the exercise of rights.”108
105
Ugo Spirito, Memorie di un incosciente, pp. 173–74.
Ugo Spirito, La critica dell’economia liberale (Milan: Treves, 1930); and I fondamenti
dell’economia corporativa (Milan: Treves, 1932).
107
Ugo Spirito, Capitalismo e corporativismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1933).
108
Mussolini, “Sindacalismo fascista,” in Oo, vol. 21, pp. 414, 415.
106
110
CHAPTER FIVE
On 6 March 1926, Mussolini outlined the argument for the emerging
totalitarian and corporativist state. He spoke of an Italy that had been
humiliated and resigned to its inferiority—and then he spoke, correspondingly, of the “enormous tasks” that confronted the state that sought to
restore the nation to its proper place in the international community. He
spoke of a system in which “everything would be within the state, nothing
outside the state, and, above all, nothing against the state. Today,” he
continued, “we come to control the forces of industry, all the forces of
finance, and all the forces of labor.”109
Mussolini spoke of the “rigid, . . . felt, substantial, and profoundly
moral discipline” that informed a state “that controlled all of the nation’s
forces.” He went on to indicate that only when there was control over all
“political, moral and economic forces, one would realize the fullness of
the Fascist corporate state”110—the industrialization of the peninsula and
the fulfillment of the more profound self identified by Actualism.
There was more in Mussolini’s pronouncements concerning the Fascist
state than was to be found in the statism of antebellum nationalism. And
there was demonstrably more than one might find in the statism of National Syndicalism. By 1927, Mussolini had abandoned whatever reservations concerning the state he had entertained when the Fascist party program spoke of the creation and defense of a Manchestrian state for an
Italy, newly emerged from the Great War, compelled to compete with the
advanced industrial “plutocracies” for a proper “place in the sun.”
There was more than nationalism or National Syndicalism in the Fascism that followed the crisis of 1925. There was the clear anticipation of
the Gentilean collectivist, totalitarian state. It was left to Ugo Spirito to
draw out the implications of what totalitarianism meant to a nation required to contend with the demands of rapid industrialization in an environment dominated by the most advanced industrial communities. It became the task of Actualists, Ugo Spirito first among them, to formulate a
comprehensive and compelling rationale that might subtend not only the
Carta del lavoro, but the totalitarian, corporativist, institutions to which
it would give rise in the years that were to follow.
109
Mussolini, “La legge sindacale,” in Oo, vol. 22, p. 91.
Mussolini, “Se avanzo, seguitemi, se indietreggio, uccidetemi; se muoio, vendicatemi,”
in Oo, vol. 22, pp. 108, 109.
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Ugo Spirito and the Rationale
of the Corporative State
IN THE DECADE between the March on Rome and the Second Congress
of Syndicalist and Corporativist Studies held in Ferrara in May 1932,
the features of revolutionary Fascism took on legislative and institutional
form. Intimations of those forms had been anticipated in Mussolini’s public statements as early as the very birth of the movement.1 After accession
to power, Fascism undertook a series of legislative acts that regularized
relations between the various factors of production, acts that Mussolini
identified as the “most courageous, most audacious, most innovative and
most revolutionary,” calculated to further economic growth and industrial development.2
Alfredo Rocco argued that because of the arduous tasks Fascism had
assumed, it would have “to dominate all the productive forces” of the
nation, thereby effecting a “transition from the democratic, liberal, to the
national state.”3 What remained uncertain was the precise characterization of the anticipated “corporative state.” What was lacking was its detailed rationale. Providing such a rationale was a task history and circumstance would assign to Ugo Spirito.
The legislation governing the national economy had been generated
piecemeal and episodically—largely in response to contingencies. Only
with the promulgation of the Carta del lavoro in 1927 was an attempt
made to inform the processes involved with doctrinal coherence. It was
at that time that Spirito assumed the responsibility of giving public expression to that coherence.4 He sought to make the case for Fascist corporativism by drawing out the implications of Gentile’s Actualism.
1
Mussolini’s commitments to National Syndicalism and some form of corporativism are
well documented. In January 1922, months before the March on Rome, he spoke of organizing the economy through “national confederations of syndical corporations” that would
serve to integrate all the forces of production in order to accelerate the nation’s agrarian
and industrial development. See the discussion in Vincenzo Nardi, Il corporativismo fascista
(Rome: Istituto Avogradro di Tecnologia, 1974), pp. 16–17.
2
Mussolini, “La legge sindacale,” Opera omnia (Florence: La fenice, 1953. Hereafter
Oo), vol. 22, pp. 132–35.
3
Alfredo Rocco, “Discorso al Senato del Regno,” in Scritti e discorsi politici (Milan:
Giuffre, 1938), 3, pp. 998, 999.
4
Years later, Spirito spoke of committing himself to applying Actualist principles to Fascism’s practical efforts—to translate general philosophical principles to immediate national
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CHAPTER SIX
Making the case for Fascist corporativism—involving the subsumption
of all the productive elements of the national economy under the dominance of a single-party state—necessitated a systematic critique of the
central convictions of Western political thought. It was argued that at
least since the seventeenth century, Western political thought maintained
that the solitary, asocial, empirical individual constituted a self-evident
reality, while the state, as but a legal fiction—the product of a “contractual” coming together of “atomic” selves—served only as constable, assuring equity and civility. That implied that the state had scant power in
undertaking anything other than ancillary activities. It was the “night
watchman,” and provided for defense of individuals, collectively, against
internal and external enemies.
At least since the beginning of the twentieth century, Gentile’s Actualism inveighed against just such a conception of individual and collective
life.5 When Spirito took up the responsibility of making the case for corporativism, the singularly Actualist conviction that the state and the individual somehow shared an identity was central to his argument.
Western intellectuals are so accustomed to the liberal conception that
the Actualist argument strikes them immediately as incomprehensible. To
provide a rationale for Fascist corporativism, Spirito was compelled to
make plausible what appeared counterintuitive to most of his audience.
As we shall see, he was to argue that individuals took on the fullness of
self only in the context created by the state.6 What that implied, he was
to maintain, was that the individual exists as a “concrete” person—one
having political, historic, moral, artistic, and religious character—only as
a product of interaction within the evolving state. What that signified
was that the “concrete” individual was, in fact, somehow inextricably
associated with the state, and as such, was critically distinct from the
“abstract” individual of traditional liberal political philosophy. Actualists
argued that the “true” individual was united with his or her community
and its executive expression, the state, in a fashion that liberals did not
appear to understand or appreciate.7 It was that argument that was to be
economic concerns. See Ugo Spirito, Critica della democrazia (Florence: Sansoni, 1963), pp.
24–36.
5
See the Actualist discussion in Volpicelli, Corporativismo e scienza del diritto, pp. 34–
36 and passim.
6
Arnaldo Volpicelli, “I Fondamenti ideali del corporativismo,” Nuovi studi di diritto,
economia e politica, n.s. 3–4 (1930), pp. 161–72, reprinted in Spirito, Il corporativismo,
pp. 470–71.
7
Spirito, “Il Liberalismo,” in Enciclopedia Italiana, vol. 21 (1934), reprinted in Spirito,
Il corporativismo, p. 116.
R AT I O N A L E O F T H E C O R P O R AT I V E S TAT E
113
central to the rationale of Fascist corporativism8—to be fully drafted by
Spirito in that context—and approved by Gentile.9 The argument was
complex, but its reconstruction recommends itself.
In 1932, as corporative institutions were given concrete legal character,
discussions devoted to their normative grounds became increasingly intense. Gentile noted that what had been a rather abstruse philosophical
argument had suddenly become a “popular” concern. He wryly noted
that the interest was contemporaneous with the fact that the principle of
the identity of the individual and the state had been proposed as an alternative to traditional liberalism—a proposal that threatened to “touch the
pocketbook” of property holders.10 The Fascist rejection of liberal political and economic thought was seen as a direct threat to private property.
The totalitarian antiliberal conception of the identification of the individual and the state had become a practical concern.
At the center of the practical concern with the security of private property was the argument that the individual could be plausibly “identified”
with the state. The entire notion was a seeming affront to common sense.
Actualism had argued, certainly as early as 1916, that the individual of
common sense could not conceivably be understood as anything other
than as a functional part of the community—whatever historic form that
community assumed (as family, horde, clan, tribe, confederation, citystate, nation, or empire). Only out of association, and an intricate web of
associations, did the empirical individual of common sense actually
emerge. As Aristotle had long since affirmed, the community, of necessity,
precedes the individual.11 It is the matrix out of which the empirical person draws substance.
Actualists argued that what had been understood in antiquity had been
lost in the modern era. In our own time, liberals argued that the individual
was to be conceived as given, as an independent and self-contained
monad. Actualists held such a notion to be “abstract and arbitrary”—
8
“The alpha and omega of the idealist theory of politics, formulated before the advent
of Fascism, . . . is the identity of the individual and the state.” Arnaldo Volpicelli, Corporativismo e scienza del diritto, p. 160.
9
Gentile was addressing the issue of the relationship between the individual and the state
on the occasion of Ugo Spirito’s communication before a meeting of corporativists. See Ugo
Spirito, Capitalismo e corporativismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1933), pp. 1–24. For Gentile’s
approving commentary, see Giovanni Gentile, “Individuo e Stato e la corporazione proprietaria,” Educazione fascista 10 (August 1932), pp. 635–38.
10
Gentile, “Individuo e stato o la corporazione proprietaria,” p. 635.
11
“The state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole
is of necessity prior to the part. . . . He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need
because he is sufficient to himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state.”
Aristotle, Politica, bk. 1, sect. 2, ll. 19–20, 28–29.
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with the individual a solitary and autonomous entity, who in his selfcentered singularity is potentially opposed to all those with whom he coexists. Within such a conception, the role of the state was reduced to the
entirely negative function of controlling the behavior of such individuals
in order to protect them from each other.12
In opposition, Actualism was to contend that the state was an antecedent and enduring “transcendental reality” in which the abstract individuals of self-indulgent liberalism actually achieved their moral being. It was
evident to Actualists that the empirical individual as he was understood
by liberalism—independent of the state—was but a “phantom,” an unlikely fiction.13 Individuation—the taking on of the attributes of individuality—was a consequence of the full integration of persons into an organic
system of responsibilities in and through which they articulate themselves.14 The community—as the state—that served as the grounds of individuation for the individual was not a construction that was inter homines, between members of the community, but an immanent reality that
arose out of members themselves. It was interiore homine.15 The community was understood to be at the core of the individual.
For Actualists, the notion that there was an empirical “individual” antecedent to society and the state was not only indefensible; it was inconceivable. For Actualists, the state was the individual writ large—outside
of the state the individual was unimaginable. Individuals simply were not
found in nature—they emerged out of an organized community. In his
first major publication, Gentile had contended that everything that endowed the empirical individual with moral substance—his or her truths,
ethical principles, religious beliefs or aesthetic tastes—were products of
life lived in community.16 The true individual was not an empirical reality.
The true individual was a “transcendental Ego . . . in which everything is
bound up in an indivisible nexus which is the system of consciousness or
of thought.” That transcendental Ego of Actualism is the “I” at the center
of which is a “We”—an ideal community which finds historic expression
in the contemporary political state.17
12
Volpicelli, “I Fondamenti ideali del corporativismo,” p. 468–69.
See the discussion ibid., pp. 12–13.
14
Spirito, “Regime gerarchico,” Civiltà fascista 1 (1934), pp. 4–14, reprinted in Spirito,
Il corporativismo, p. 388.
15
Gentile, Discorsi di religione, 3rd ed. (1920; Florence: Sansoni, 1955), pp. 22–23.
16
Gentile’s argument is available in translation in Gentile, The Theory of Mind as Pure
Act (New York: Macmillan, 1922), chaps. 1–5, 7, and 8: and The Reform of Education,
selections from which appear in Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism Together with Selections from Other Works, trans. A. J. Gregor (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002).
17
These themes are found throughout Gentile’s work, but most conveniently found in
English in his posthumous work, Genesis and Structure of Society (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1960), pp. 82–85.
13
R AT I O N A L E O F T H E C O R P O R AT I V E S TAT E
115
One of the central arguments of Actualism, bearing on that theme,
turned on the conviction that the essence of the human being was thought
and thinking—and neither could be conceived, in any real sense, as private
or individual. Thought, as thinking—with all its judgments, convictions,
evaluations, conclusions, and confirmations—intrinsically involves language. And there are no “private” languages. Every so-called private language, like every encryption, is parasitic on public language. “Correct
usage” and comprehensibility imply common use. Actualists argued that
the criteria governing all such activities are collective and intersubjective—
the product of a common history. They are embodied in inherited speech
modalities and in exchanges among the living, and through literature, with
the dead. For Gentile and the Actualists there was no “private language,”
just as there were no uniquely individual judgments. Language, like the
individual, was a function of interaction with an historic “audience”—
composed of our present interlocutors, together with all those who have
gone before, as well as all those who would, one day, come after us and
judge our every thought, and the behavior it sponsored.18
Each one of us, it was argued, takes pride in our speech, in our prose,
and in communication in general. We create ourselves in such exercises
of free expression. We conceive of our communication as specifically our
own—and yet, no one pretends that any of us has created the vocabulary,
grammar, or syntax employed. The language in which we revel, which
serves as a vehicle for our “unique” and “free” communication, is an
historic, collective product. Without its availability we would all be essentially mute and infinitely less than we are.19
In such a conception, the “rules” and “laws” of language are necessary
if the individual is to uniquely and freely express him- or herself. The
rules and laws become an interior norm, rendering comprehensible the
formulations that would otherwise be arbitrary and unintelligible. The
individual would have achieved meaningful freedom of expression because he or she would have “identified,” become one, with the inherited,
collective patterns that govern effective speech.20
The notion that the individual might seek and find expession in a “private language” was summarily dismissed—and the general argument was
invoked to similarly dismiss the prospect of “private initiative” in the
18
In his first exposition of “the act of thought as a pure act,” in 1911, Gentile outlined
his argument concerning the collective nature of thought and thinking; see Giovanni Gentile, L’Atto del pensare come atto puro (1911; reprint Florence: Sansoni, 1937), paras. 3,
5, 8, and 10.
19
See the account in Ugo Spirito, “L’identificazione di individuo e Stato,” in I fondamenti
dell’economia corporativa in Il corporativismo, pp. 206–8.
20
See the rendering in Volpicelli, “Individuo e stato nella concezione corporativa,” in
Corporativismo e scienza del diritto, pp. 12–13.
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economy. Actualists maintained that there could no more be private initiatives undertaken in economic matters than there could be a private language employed in the individual efforts to communicate. The economy,
like speech, was an “organic” product of social history—possessed of
rules, laws, and codes of conduct that did not confine or inhibit individuals, but rather supplied the preconditions for their “true” freedom, the
achievement of those ends truly chosen.
For Actualists, to truly choose a behavior or a goal implied the concrete
application of right reason—a reason collaboratively shared by one’s
community—a reason innocent of prejudice, selfishness, material or logical error. In that sense, individual freedom was understood to be predicated on right reason, itself the historic product of systematic scientific
and humanistic education.21
These concepts were recognized as the foundations of an inescapably
pedagogical, ecclesiastic, ethical, and collectivistically oriented political
state. Even in the most pedestrian texts provided for the instruction of
students, it was acknowledged that the “atomistic individuality” of liberal
economics had to be abandoned because, unlike Fascist corporativist theory, it failed to “include and synthesize” individuals in the economic activities of the state, and thereby failed to create the conditions in which
individuals could achieve “their highest human value.”22
Spirito’s efforts turned on making the case for the identification of the
individual and the state, drawing out its collectivist implications.23 He
argued that the liberal notion of individuality was indefensible both in
terms of social science and morality. However important the atomistic
conception of the individual had been in the struggle against the absolute
monarchies of Europe, the fact remained that the economy of a community was no more the product of individual initiatives than its language.
Spirito argued that the economies of modern nations had become so
enormous, so all-inclusive, and so extensive in scope that no one could
convincingly argue that they were the exclusive products of individual
enterprise. However unreal the logic of “free enterprise,” its convictions
21
See Gentile, La riforma dell’educazione: Discorsi ai maestri di Trieste (Florence: Sansoni, 1955), chaps. 9–11.
22
A. Serpieri, Principii di economia politica corporativa, 2nd ed. (Florence: Barbera,
1944), p. 33. The volume, it will be noted, was published at the end of the Fascist era. By
that time, Actualist arguments had become common in the justificatory logic of corporativism. All of that notwithstanding the fact that the author identified himself as a “liberal” by
citing Vilfredo Pareto and Maffeo Pantaleoni as his “masters” (p. viii).
23
Spirito, “Individuo e stato nell’economia corporativa,” Capitalismo e corporativismo,
reprinted in Spirito, Il corporativismo, pp. 351–68. The thesis was repreated again in “L’identificaziione di individuo e stato,” in I fondamenti dell’economia corporativa, reprinted in Il
corporativismo, pp. 195–208. The implications were drawn out in “Benessere individuo e
benessere sociale,” in Il corporativismo, pp. 219–22.
R AT I O N A L E O F T H E C O R P O R AT I V E S TAT E
117
had produced, over time, a disposition among the denizens of modern
industry to organize in exclusive interest groups, united in defense of their
special concerns. The result was a contentious, fractious economy with
its several component groups each pursuing conflicting, and sometimes
mutually exclusive, purposes.
A corporativist economy would recognize the social character of production, with individual initiative governed by social needs and social
goals. Like the instructor who tutors individuals in the correct employment of language, thereby enhancing the student’s freedom to communicate, the corporative state discharges a similar tutelary function with respect to the economy. In the final analysis, the true freedom of the
individual does not find expression in the primitive pursuit of private interests, but in the collaborative effort to achieve collective ends.
Spirito held that the Labor Charter of 1927 implied the Actualist conception of the individual and his or her freedoms. He maintained that, in
fact, Actualist “affirmations” concerning the individual and the state had
received their “first synthetic formulation” in the Charter.24 They were
implied in the notion that labor was a social responsibility conducted
under the tutelage of the state. They were implicit in the contention that
both private initiative and the private organization of production were
understood to be “functions of national interest.”25
In Actualism, the distinction between the governed and those who govern is lost. Just as the student, to maximize linguistic abilities, identifies
with his or her teacher, the individual, to maximize economic freedom,
must identify with the state. The essentially spiritual character of the relationship between the individual and society—in its “concretization” in
the state—would become immediately evident.26
The inevitable consequence would be that the artificial distinctions between what is conceived “public” and that conceived “private” in the
nation’s economy would gradually disappear.27 The social character of
property and enterprise would become increasingly apparent. Weakened,
equally well and as a consequence, would be the tendency for human
beings to identify themselves almost exclusively in terms of material—
that is, class distinctions at the expense of the fundamental moral unity
of society.
24
Spirito, “Prime linee di una storia delle dottrine economiche,” in Il corporativismo,
p. l04.
25
Carta del lavoro in Atti fondamentali del fascismo (Rome: Nuova editrice Lara, 1969),
paras. 2 and 7.
26
See Volpicelli’s specific comments in this respect, “Individuo e stato nella concezione
corporativa,”in Corporativismo e scienza del diritto, pp. 10–11.
27
Spirito, “L’identificazione di individuo e stato,” Nuovi studi di diritto, economia e
politica 3, no. 6 (November–December 1930), pp. 373–75.
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Ultimately, a community’s economy must be seen as a collective undertaking with the “entire life of the individual . . . understood as essentially
public or political by definition.”28 Property would no longer count as
private. With the dissipation of liberal fictions, the social, and “organic”
character of property would became transparent.29 The ownership of
property would no longer be perceived as a reward for individual effort.
Rather, property would be understood as eminently an historical and social product, the result of contributions made throughout the collective
history of the community, its defense, the inheritance of inventions, techniques, rules of conduct, and established instruments of transfer.
While the transformation to the new society into its communalist form
would necessarily be slow,30 Fascism had inaugurated the process by creating intermediate agencies between society, its economy, and the political
state.31 Through a chain of interlocking associations, commencing with a
variety of youth and student groups, professional, labor, and entrepreneurial organizations, the population of the nation would no longer be
composed of those who rule and those who are ruled; everyone would
merge into a regime of governance. No longer would the government be
distinguished from the general population; everyone would be involved
in governance. There is no specific place where government would end
and privacy begin.
For Gentileans, the contemporary state was the product of a long historical progression, shaped by the thought and the actions of our forebears. In our own time, the state provides the set of nested associations
in which each of us achieves our humanity. As the ultimate repository of
collective sovereignty, it is the historic state that fashions the moral and
intellectual environment in which each of us achieves reality as a selfconscious individual. It is the state—whatever its institutional permutations—that supplies the formal and informal education that shapes individual consciousness. All the agencies that are seen as contributing to the
process—the family, religion, the schools—all exist as a consequence of
the sufferance and guidance of the sovereign state. In the modern world,
what is permitted and what is proscribed is defined in law, and supplemented by custom and usage—all of which, in the final analysis is controlled, directly or indirectly, by the sovereign state.32
28
Volpicelli, “Individuo e stato nella concezione corporativa,” p. 18.
See Spirito, “Politica e economia corporativa,” in Il corporativismo, pp. 60–69.
30
See Spirito, “Individuo e stato nella concezione corporativa,” Capitalismo e corporativismo, in Il corporativismo, p. 352.
31
Spirito, “Il corporativismo come liberalismo assoluto e socialismo assoluto,” in Il corporativismo, p. 378.
32
See the account given by Gentile, Introduzione alla filosofia (Rome: Treves-TreccaniTumminelli, 1933), chap. 9; and Discorsi di religione, pt. 1, sec. 6.
29
R AT I O N A L E O F T H E C O R P O R AT I V E S TAT E
119
In the effort to translate such arguments into the contemporary reality
of the Fascist state, Ugo Spirito and Arnaldo Volpicelli,33 as Actualists,
formulated the philosophical, political, and economic rationale for the
“corporative state.” In its most rudimentary form, the argument held that
as empirical individuals reflect on their lives, rationally anticipating outcomes, calculating probabilities and moral responsibilities, what emerges
is predicated on the presence of a transcendental will, a general will that
is not a simple summing of solitary wills, each in all its particularity—but
a will, shaped by historical realities, that reflects a universality possessed
of moral character, against which all judgments, are measured. Among
Actualists, such a subtending general will looks surprisingly like the general will alluded to by J. J. Rousseau.
Rousseau and many of his contemporaries were convinced that collective
exposure to a standard public education, in circumstances as similar as
possible, with training in comparable conditions so that each would be
exposed to essentially the same stimuli, would tend to render citizens eminently uniform in their values, judgments, and aspirations. That would
reinforce the harmony in which the energy of each was united, in liberty,
with the will of all—to give rise to a system Fascists identified as “totalitarian democracy.”34 It is “democratic” because it embodies a harmony of
sentiments and goals that is not coerced, that externalizes itself as the will
of an historic community, finding its executive expression in the state.
When, in 1932, Gentile wrote the preamble to the Dottrina del fascismo that was to become the formal statement of Fascist doctrine, he
spoke of the “most genuine form of democracy” as that which “finds
expression at those times when the consciousness and will of the few, even
of one, manifests itself in the consciousness and will of all.”35 In his final
apologetic for his life as a Fascist—more than a decade later—Gentile
spoke of the ability of one person to speak for an entire political commu33
Arnaldo Volpicelli was born in Rome on 30 July 1892. He served as a professor of the
philosophy of law and of the doctrine of the state at the universities of Urbino, Pisa, and
Rome. His major works include Pedagogia polemica (Rome: De Alberti, 1925); Natura e
spirito (Rome: De Alberti, 1925); Il Problema della rappresentanza nello stato corporativo
(Florence: Sansoni, 1934); and Corporativismo e scienza giuridica (Florence: Sansoni, 1934).
34
Bruno Spampanato, Democrazia fascista (Rome: “Politica nuova,” 1933). See the discussion in J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1960),
pp. 29, 43–45.
35
Benito Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo (Milan: Hoepli, 1935), pp. 14–15. Gentile
wrote the first section of the official Dottrina entitled “Idee fondamentali.” The characterization of the Fascist regime as “democratic” was common among Fascist theoreticians. See,
for example, Antonio Navarra, “Governo e governati in regime fascista,” in C. Arena, ed.,
La Camera dei fasci e delle corporazioni (Florence: Sansoni, 1937), p. 165, where he speaks
of the Fascist government as an “authoritarian democracy.”
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nity. He spoke unselfconsciously of a consensus gentium—the collective
voice of a people immanent in the individual—that served to confirm the
leader in his leadership.36
These general notions were provided support by more empirical accounts that were relatively common among academicians who had become prominent on the Italian peninsula by the end of the nineteenth
century. Gaetano Mosca, long before the advent of Fascism, had mounted
assessments of political life that provided collateral support for just the
kind of elite rule suggested by Actualism.37 He was followed by Vilfredo
Pareto and his notion of the dominance and succession of political elites
in the shaping of history.38
Within the social science literature of the period that concerns us, one
of the central claims, around which most of the discussion gravitated, was
that political “democracy,” as it was understood in the West, was fatally
flawed. The argument was that representative democracy, in the industrialized economies of the West, manifested itself in elections that, at best,
reflected the choices of an unthinking mass. More often than not, in such
democracies, the choices were really those of monied, political and intellectual interests that succeeded in manipulating those who cast their ballots in good faith, but with precious little security of outcome. Individuals
in liberal societies, lumped together geographically for the purposes of
exercising suffrage, shared little in common. As a consequence, there was
very little unanimity in terms of interests, projects, or intentions that
might constitute the “general consensus” that, in turn, could provide the
“democratic” support for elite rule. Workers, entrepreneurs, agriculturalists, educators, bankers, professionals of all sorts, would be brought together haphazardly and periodically, and then expected to intelligently
“choose” their leaders in what Fascists held to be a meaningless exercise.
Fascists were to argue that citizens in the industrialized democracies really had very little choice in terms of their leaders. Their choices, Fascists
argued, were very largely determined by occult and special interest groups,
media manipulation, mimetism, suggestibility, and errant influences.39
36
Gentile, Genesi e struttura della società (Verona: Mondadori, 1954), p. 46, see pp.
44–48.
37
Gaetano Mosca, Elementi di scienza politica (1896; Bari: Laterza, 1953); see Roberto
Michels, “Gaetano Mosca und seine Staatstheorien,” Schmollers Jahrbuch 53, no. 5 (1929),
pp. 111–30.
38
See Roberto Michels, “Literatur zum Problem der Führer und Massen,” Zeitschrift für
Politik 22, no. 7 (1932), pp. 482–84; and Rodolfo De Mattei, “La dottrina della ’classe
politica’ e il fascismo,” Educazione fascista 9 (1931), pp. 675–86.
39
The classic expression of this argument is found in Roberto Michels, Zur Soziologie
des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie (Leipzig: Hartmann, 1911), translated as
Political Parties.
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The general voter tends to be ignorant of issues, uncertain of his or her
interests, incompetent in dealing with them even if known, more comfortable in a disciplined environment that makes few demands on his or her
limited capabilities, and, more often than not, subject to the moral suasion
of articulate and self-possessed political leaders. The consequence, Fascist
theoreticians maintained, was the “incontrovertible scientific fact” that
all political communities were governed overtly or covertly by one or
another “political elite.”40 In times of mortal peril, when a community
faces crises that threaten its very survival, a “rotation of elites” takes
place—and a revolutionary cadre has the historic opportunity of marshaling populations to their purpose in the effort to resolve challenges. Out of
a population in crisis, the new elite collects around itself a revolutionary
aristocracy—which serves as the vanguard of systemic change. In such
circumstances, the riveting of attention on a critical common concern creates that “harmony of interests” out of which a “general” or “transcendental” will arises—on which a “Fascist democracy” rests.41
Italian theoreticians were to make much of these generalizations—most
of which predated the advent of Fascist rule.42 After the establishment of
the regime, Fascist intellectuals advocated the creation of a “pedagogical
state” that would assume the responsibility of training its citizens from
birth to full maturity so that they would participate in a collective “harmony” of shared values, commitments, and projects that was expected to
follow the revolution.43
Such advocates were to maintain that all “ruling elites,” in order to
rule, must foster and sustain an irreducible minimum of consensus—by
exploiting a popular sense of threat, and appealing to the general thirst
40
Roberto Michels, “Il partito politico,” L’Ordine fascista 10, nos. 3–4, pp. 183–88; see
“Il concetto di partito nella storia italiana moderna,” Università fascista 1, no. 9 (1930),
pp. 33–35.
41
One of the clearest formulations of this entire argument is conveniently found in Bruno
Spampanato, Democrazia fascista.
42
There is a great deal of “protofascist” literature available that gave form and substance
to these generalizations. That literature, written by some of Italy’s more interesting social
science thinkers, was devoted to the psychology of crowds, the suggestibility of groups, and
the influence of meneurs, leaders, on assemblies. Roberto Michels, among the twentieth century’s most celebrated social scientists, contributed to this literature as a Fascist. See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction,
1999), chaps. 3 and 4. Michels was one among many who provided substance to the kinds
of generalizations with which we have been here concerned. See Gregor, The Ideology of
Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), chaps. 2 and 3.
43
As we shall see, Sergio Panunzio argued in support of these specific educational responsibilities—in order to provide vindication for Fascism’s claims to represent a “centralized
and authoritarian democracy.” See Panunzio, Teoria general dello stato fascista (Padua:
CEDAM, 1939), pt. 1.
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for security and accomplishment. Carefully orchestrated, such a system
produces and sustains compliance behavior—the foundation of a reasoned general consensus—together with a readiness for disciplined collective sacrifice. All of which was understood to give substance to the conception of a Rousseauean “general will.”44
For Gentileans, the consensus that sustained the “true democracy” toward which they aspired was the product of sentiment, instruction, and
entirely rational calculation. True freedom, Actualists argued, would consist of the seamless identification of the individual with his historic community, an identity of interests, emotion, and reasoned purpose. All that,
it was argued, must be the result of education, broadly conceived. “The
educator,” seeking such ends, “must awaken interests that without him
would forever lie dormant. He must direct others towards goals which
they would be unable to appreciate properly if left alone . . . . The educator must, in short, transfuse into others something of himself, and out of
a shared spiritual substance create elements of mind and will” that would
make leadership the externalization of a reality already immanent in
the community.45
These convictions supplied the public vindication of rule by a “dominant party”—a political body that sought to implement the focused policies of an exiguous elite—intended to address the problems of the epoch.
Political leadership was understood to arrange itself in a hierarchy in
order to discipline and educate the forces available, to unite them to given
purposes, and to maneuver them rapidly. This would be particularly true
if the community were traversing a demanding and dangerous time.46
While most of these accounts were couched in standard social science
formulations,47 they overlapped with the thought of Gentile, who as early
as the First World War argued that societies were invariably led by individuals and small groups of individuals who could sense, draw out, and fully
articulate prevailing collective sentiments in order to achieve common
purpose. Gentile frequently spoke of historic individuals who had im44
See Roberto Michels, “Osservazioni retrospettive sulla democrazia e sul consenso,” La
stirpe 10, no. 12 (December 1932), pp. 533–34.
45
Gentile, La riforma dell’educazione: Discorsi ai maestri di Trieste (Florence: Sansoni,
1955), pp. 30–31. For a discussion of Fascist pedagogical strategies, see Luca La Rovere,
Storia dei GUF: Organizzazione, politica, e miti della gioventù universitaria fascista, 1919–
1943 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).
46
See Roberto Michels, “Le forze essenziali del divenire politico,” L’Ordine fascista 12,
nos. 8–9 (1933), pp. 522–28; and “Il partito politico,” p. 184.
47
Roberto Michels, identified as an important “party comrade,” was the most notable
of these theoreticians. He published extensively on the subject of political elites. See Carlo
Curcio, “L’opera politica di Roberto Michels,” in Studi in memoria di Roberto Michels
(Padua: CEDAM, 1937), pp. 15–76.
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pacted their time specifically because they had the faculty of sensing, acting on, and subsequently shaping popular opinion.48
However these claims were expressed, in the formulations of social science49 or via historical example, they provided the rationale for elite
rule—and the logic of the transcendental general will that presumably
constituted the ultimate support for corporativism. In general, by the time
the first institutions of the corporative state made their appearance, few
apologists felt it necessary to repeat them. What was clearly understood
was that such arguments provided the intellectual justification for corporativism itself, as it transformed itself in its dynamically changing environment. The members of the category syndicates, instead of being animated
exclusively by the personal concerns, would find an identity in the larger
community—an identity that would enhance their humanity.
In the period between 1927 and the mid-1930s, Ugo Spirito assumed
the responsibility of drawing out the implications of just such arguments.
Preliminary to the articulation of plausible argument was an extended
and relentless critique of anti-Fascist liberal economic thought—which
Spirito maintained was derivative of the philosophical individualism that
was at its heart.50
Spirito held that liberal economic thought, as it evolved—particularly
during the nineteenth century—was one expression of an inclusive scientific liberalism. Predicated on the individualism that had been evident in
all the activities that defined the Renaissance and the Reformation, the
scientific activities of liberal thinkers had early become “scientistic,”
imagining that human inquiry into nature, society, and humanity could
be, in and of itself, “value-free”—and, thereby, entirely “objective.” Objectivity had become the twin of individualism.
These were the cardinal features of the cognitive perspective that Actualists identified as “positivistic.” The most rigorous positivists sought to
provide naturalistic and objective explanations for all manifestations of the
human spirit. Human beings were understood to be nothing more than
parts of nature, their behavior governed by causal regularities. The inspiration for such positivism was a rigorous Newtonian mechanical atomism in
which all of nature was the consequence of the commingling of small,
massy particles—“atoms,” or “monads”—interacting in a field of forces.
48
Gentile, “Il significato della vittoria (25 October 1918),” Dopo la vittoria: Nuovi frammenti politici (Rome: “La Voce,” 1920), pp. 5–6.
49
Characteristic social science formulations are found in the works of Guido Bortolotto;
see his Massen und Führer in der faschistischen Lehre (n.p.: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt,
1934).
50
Spirito, Capitalismo e corporativismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1933), p. 28 (origianlly published as “Il corporativismo come liberalismo assoluto e socialismo assoluto,” Nuovi studi
di diritto, economia e politica 6 [1932], pp. 285–98).
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Some such notions surfaced at the turn of the century in the formulations of social scientists such as Ludwig Gumplowicz and Vilfredo Pareto.
Like the positivists of the period, Pareto sought “to construct a system of
sociology on the model of celestial mechanics, physics, [and] chemistry.”51
He was to argue that like celestial mechanics, physics, and chemistry, neither sociological nor economic “laws” admit exception52—all of which
seemed to imply that the world of human experience was governed by the
determinism and the intrinsic amorality of the “objective laws of nature.”
Actualism refused to consider the possibility that empirical science
could “discover” lawlike regularities that governed the individual and
collective conduct of human beings “without exception.” Actualists were
not only to object to the attempt, by positivists, to rigorously distinguish
the “scientific” world of “objective” assessment from what Actualists
identified as the total reality of “subjective” human experience; they objected to the conceptual framework that conceived individuals as abstract,
solitary, and self-regarding “atoms.” For Spirito, the conviction that such
distinctions could be entertained constituted the central fiction of the positivism at the turn of the twentieth century.53
True to the essentials of Actualist historicism, Spirito held that all science,
in some indeterminate measure, was shaped by human values and contingencies prevalent at any given period of time. It was not only the case that
whatever natural or social laws empirical science might contrive could only
be time and circumstance sensitive;54 the entire notion that human beings
might be meaningfully dealt with as asocial beings was defective.
The conviction that there were immutable and transtemporal general
laws governing the behavior of nature as well as that of human beings
was part of the irrepressible, if mistaken, positivistic faith that inspired
the intellectuals of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century.55 The notion that scientists “discovered” such laws in an “external nature” that
antedated their presence was understood to be one of the unargued, and
unarguable, presuppositions of positivistic “empirical science” at the beginning of the century.56 The other was the conception of individuals as
independent, asocial atoms.
51
Vilfredo Pareto, A Treatise on General Sociology (New York: Dover, 1935), vol. 1,
p. 16.
52
Vilfredo Pareto, Manuale di economia politica (Milan: Libraria, 1919), p. 7.
53
Ugo Spirito, “La nuova scienza dell’economia secondo Werner Sombart,” 1930–
1931(?), reprinted in Il Corporativismo, p. 329.
54
Ugo Spirito, “Prime linee di una storia delle dottrine economiche,” Enciclopedia Italiana, 13 (1932), reprinted in Il corporativismo, pp. 98–99.
55
Ibid., p. 331.
56
In this context, see the articles on science and philosophy written by Gentile’s son,
Giovanni Gentile, Jr., in Scritti minori di scienza, filosofia e letteratura (Florence: Sansoni,
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In general, Actualists conceived science not as a unique undertaking,
but very much as they conceived art and religion, as one “moment” within
the global totality of human experience. Governed by its own historically
relative orientations, standards of competence, and utilitarian purposes,
science was seen as a rigorous manner of reordering experience to meet
specific time-sensitive standards and in order to discharge specific temporal functions.57 In that sense, Actualists did not argue that the findings of
natural science were untrue. The findings of contemporary empirical science met the requirements of their respective undertakings. But that was
always accomplished within a set of historic and philosophical circumstances. However remarkable its contemporary achievements, modern
science did not satisfy the specifically philosophical requirement that its
enterprise be “presuppositionless.”58
For Actualists, the recognition that all empirical inquiry was predicated
on some presuppositions, accepted uncritically as inerrant,59 identified science, in and of itself and in general, as a “dogmatic” and “intellectualistic” activity.60 Characteristic of such undertakings, science is “abstract”
in its lucubrations, rather than “concrete.”61 Actualists held that positivists were particularly “abstract” and “dogmatic” because they held that
their activities were singularly “objective,” dismissing the inspection of
the epistemological issues that occupied Actualism as “meaningless metaphysics.” That, conjoined with the intrinsic atomized individualism that
1943), particularly “Il Nuovo panorama della scienza,” which appeared in Leonardo in
April 1934, republished in the above citation, pp. 40–53, in which the younger Gentile
refers to “science” as the product of the logical reconstruction, in consciousness, of human
experience.
57
An illuminating discussion of this aspect of Actualism can be found in Pasquale Romanelli, The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile: An Inquiry into Gentile’s Conception of Experience (New York: Birnbaum, 1937), chap. 3. During the latter part of the twentieth century
a sophisticated argument for the “historicity” of the standards of science was reiterated by
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962).
58
See the discussion in Roger W. Holmes, The Idealism of Giovanni Gentile (New York:
Macmillan, 1937), pp. 189–91.
59
A presupposition acknowledged by European thinkers certainly as early as David Hume.
60
This is the particular meaning given to the term “intellectualistic” so sorely misused
by anti-Fascist critics for half a hundred years. “Intellectualism,” as used by serious Fascist
thinkers, refers to the “dogmatic” readiness on the part of some to consider the “world”
dualistically, as a prefabricated “nature” opposing an observing “self.” It is nowhere used
to suggest that Fascists should be unthinking or irrational. See Gentile, Teoria generale dello
spirito come atto puro, chap. 15; and the comments of Spirito, “La Nuova scienza,” in Il
corporativismo, p. 331.
61
See Spirito’s discussion in “L’Avvenire della scienza dell’economia,” Nuovi studi di
diritto, economia e politica 6 (1928), reproduced in Il corporativismo, pp. 54–55.
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animated liberal thought, made prevailing economic theories, in Spirito’s
judgment, antithetical to Fascism, in general, and Fascist corporativist
thinking, in particular.
Spirito, and the Actualists who committed themselves to the defense
of corporativism, identified the defeat of the liberal preoccupation with
individualism—and positivism’s faith in the transhistorical and invariant
character of scientific laws—as critical to their task. Both negatively affected the intellectual environment of Fascist Italy and generated much of
the resistance to corporativist theory and practice that was evident among
professional economists.62
Convinced of what was required, Spirito began a systematic methodological critique of liberal economics and positivism as a metatheory of
science. His preliminary critique began by calling attention to the fact that
much of the vocabulary of classical economics was composed of terms that
were loosely framed and ambiguous in reference—making the confirmation of any empirical claims containing such terms difficult, if not impossible.63 That, together with the fact that conscious and unconscious presuppositions littered its projects,64 compromised its efforts. Most critical of
those presuppositions, of course, was the individualistic biases that shaped
much of the substance of liberal—that is, classical—economic theory.65
Spirito selected the economic theories of Pareto as a point of departure—and his employment of the term “ophelimity” as an illustrative
case.66 The term was understood to refer to “the individual’s satisfaction
. . . [of which] he is the only judge.”67 That satisfaction characterized “the
relationship between an individual and a given thing”—thereby rendering
the individual’s satisfaction unique, and impossible to compare over time
or intersubjectively. The underlying concept was clearly asocial—with the
fundamentals of social and economic reality reduced to what could only
62
Spirito refers to the outspoken academic criticism addressed to the corporativist convictions to which he and his colleagues gave expression during the early and mid-1930s. See
Spirito, Memorie di un incosciente (Milan: Rusconi, 1977), chap. 3.
63
Spirito made the point that the intrinsic ambiguities that attended the porous definition
of critical terms was often concealed by classical economists by their regular use of statistics
to provide a spurious rigor to their work. See Spirito, “Vilfredo Pareto,” in Il corporativismo, pp. 149–53.
64
Il corporativismo, p. 52. See Vilfredo Pareto’s recognition of these disabilities, A Treatise on General Sociology (New York: Dover, 1935), vol. 1, para. 119.
65
Recognizing that the terms “classical” and “liberal” have uncertain referents, it is
enough to recognize that Pareto is generally identified with classical economists of the persuasion of M.E.L. Walras, Alfred Marshall, W. S. Jevons and Irving Fisher. See Warren J.
Samuels, Pareto on Policy (New York: Elsevier, 1974), chap. 1.
66
See Spirito, “Vilfredo Pareto (1927–1929),” Il corporativismo, pp. 129–56.
67
Pareto, A Treatise on General Sociology, vol. 4, para. 2110. Emphasis supplied.
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be considered interaction among what used to be identified as “windowless monads” by Cartesians.
Pareto seems to have drawn out the implications. “Between two distinct
subjects,” he acknowledged, “there can be no rigorous comparison of
ophelimities.”68 As a necessary consequence, some of the very fundamentals of his economic notions were emphatically individualistic and fundamentally asocial. His conceptual schemata rested on unexamined individualistic presuppositions.
Spirito insisted that such presuppositions prejudiced any effort to understand the relationship of politics and economics and, in the last analysis, left the enterprise confined to the individual and his or her peculiar
interests. Spirito insisted that one of the inescapable implications of such
an interpretation of the individual, his interests, and his relationship to
the community was that the individual regularly found himself opposed
by community interests—that his interests and those of the community
were somehow incompatible or antithetical. The very definition of “ophelimity” implied an irreducible tension between the economic utilities of
the community and the satisfactions of the atomic individual.
While the utility of the community might “roughly be assumed . . .
there is no such thing as the ophelimity of a community.” The measure
of the utility of the community and the satisfaction of the individual were,
by definition, incommensurable.69 The evident suggestion was that the
relationship between the state and the individual could only be adversarial. Spirito argued that such analyses implied the interests of the community could only be served at the cost of the individual. Whatever the case,
it clearly appeared to Spirito that liberal economic thought was, in significant part, a function of the interaction of liberal political biases interacting with the atomistic presuppositions of positivistic science.
It was the individualistic bias of liberal economic thought that made of
the “individual” of positivism the potential enemy of the community and
its executive expression in the state. If the satisfactions of the individual
were unique and nonquantifiable, it could never really be argued with assurance that those satisfactions were fully compatible with the interests of the
community. The individual always remained, at best, agnostic with respect
to the state. More characteristically, the individual was always the potential
enemy of the state. The features of that potential enemy of the state were
implicit in the classical notion of human conduct being a function of the
lawlike behaviors of the hedonistic, self-absorbed, and atomistic homo oeconomicus—the “economic man” of free-market liberal economics.
68
Vilfredo Pareto, Corso di economia politica (Turin: Einaudi, 1949), 2, pp. 51–52.
Spirito, “Politica ed economia corporativa,” a lecture given at the University of Pisa,
15 February 1932, and reproduced in Il corporativismo, pp. 66–67.
69
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The corollary was the conviction that the “unalienable rights” of the
individual must forever be protected from the community. The economic
and political relationship between the individual and the state would always remain potentially “zero/sum,” with the individual’s gain being a
necessary loss for the state, and conversely the state’s gain always a potential loss for the individual.
For Actualists, if corporativism was to be successful, it must of necessity
reject the liberal conviction that the state and the individual, and the communities of individuals that composed it, were intrinsically adversarial. It
was not enough, in their judgment, to put together the means of mitigating an inevitable and recurrent clash of interests. What was necessary
was to create an environment in which individuals, and communities of
individuals, would identify their most fundamental interests with those
of the state.
For Spirito, Fascist syndicalism and corporativism commenced as “a
grand experiment in economic conciliation . . . that is to say, as an effort
in the reconciliation of class interests within the superior interests of the
nation.”70 It was acknowledged that, at its commencement, Fascist corporativism was an attempt at reconciliation. It did not constitute a resolution of differences; it was an effort at reconciliation. For about a decade
corporativism had sought to reconcile class interests through the intervention of the Labor Courts. In doing that, corporativism had succeeded
only in institutionalizing class differences. While it had defended the productive integrity of the nation, individual and class differences continued
to separate individuals and classes from their integral unity with the totalitarian state.
Throughout its early years, Fascism understood the corporations to be
nothing less that “the instrument which, under the aegis of the state, actuates the integral, organic and unitary discipline of the forces of production
with a view to the expansion of the wealth, political power and well-being
of the Italian people.”71 Under the aegis of the state, the class struggle
had been moderated, and not permitted to undermine the industrializing
efforts of the regime—but there were very few who imagined that the
system would long remain as it was. It was everywhere recognized as
transitional.
If corporativism were to be successful, the sense of separation suffered
by individuals and associations of individuals with respect to themselves
and the community must be first tempered and then resolved. Individual
and parochial interests must find the satisfaction of their most fundamental interests in the interests of the community, the nation, and their execu70
71
Il corporativismo, p. 356.
Mussolini, “Dichiarazione per le costituende corporazioni,” in Oo, vol. 26, p. 85.
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tive expression, the state. Individuals, syndicates, categories, confederations and corporations must all find their ultimate identity in the
“community of destiny,” the nation-state, that defines them and gives substance to their lives.
All of this was transpiring while the international community lapsed
into the Great Depression. Industrializing Italy was savagely impacted.
Overall production declined precipitously. Unemployment escalated.
Mussolini no longer spoke of the dislocation as being “within the capitalist productive system,” but as being an affliction “of the system itself.”
He refered to the crisis “as no longer a transient disability, but a systemic
disease.”72 For Mussolini, the weight of contemporary evidence convinced
him that the inherited economic system required radical intervention.
That intervention would be effectuated through syndicates. Through
them, workers and employers would directly participate in the nation’s
productive processes. They would directly collaborate in pursuit of defined ends through means collectively determined. The interventions of
the state would no longer count as violations of speculative freedoms.
They would be the product of deliberations undertaken by knowledgeable members of associations composed of those involved in every aspect
of production.
Within such a conception “corporativism is animated by the possibility
of morally and technically unifying social life; it believes in the joy of
giving and of sacrifice. It is opposed to every uniquely private goal
in life and precisely for that reason, corporativism is not an economic
notion, but the unique political, moral, religious, essence of the Fascist
revolution.”73
Until the Great Depression, Fascist Italy had succeeded in rapidly increasing its industrial output. Two years after the succession of Mussolini
to power, labor stoppages, which had seriously impaired the nation’s productivity, had all but ceased. Output escalated. With the coming of the
international economic dislocation, however, plants began to operate
below capacity. Concern became insistent.74 The international economic
crisis fueled demands for salvage and increasing state management.
72
Mussolini, “Discorso per lo stato corporativo,” in Oo, vol. 26, 87.
Spirito, “Il corporativismo come negazione dell’economia,” communication before the
National Fascist Institute of Culture, 16 June 1934, reprinted in Il corporativismo, p. 79.
Compare with Mussolini: “There does not exist an economic fact that is of exclusively
private and individual interest; from the day in which human beings adapted themselves to
community life among their similars, from that day not a single act that the individual undertook developed or concluded with him alone, but that its repercussions extend far from his
person.” Mussolini, “Discorso al Senato per lo stato corporativo,” in Oo, vol. 26, p. 147.
74
See Bruno Caizzi, Storia dell’industria Italiana (Turin: UTET, 1965), chap. 5.
73
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In the years after the March on Rome, notwithstanding the modifications in detail and changes in institutional structure, the basic legislation
governing Fascist corporativism had remained substantially the same.
With the enactment of the basic syndical law of 3 April 1926—through
which worker and employer organizations undertook to legally recognize
one another as sole bargaining representatives of their respective categories—only operational specifics had altered. Only one syndicate for each
category in each district would be recognized by the authorities—each
syndicate including at least 10 percent of all workers employed in its category. Labor courts adjudicated issues brought before them by such duly
recognized organizations.
By 1930, the labor syndicates were drawn together into confederations
to be joined by similar employers’ associations. Thirteen confederations
representing the major economic activities of the nation were grouped
into sections composed of workers and employers. They sent their respective presidents and a given number of delegates to a Consiglio nazionale
delle corporazioni (National Council of Corporations). Beneath the National Council there were Provincial Councils of Corporative Economy,
charged with the promotion and coordination of economic activities
within their respective provinces. Appointees of the Fascist party served
in all these organizations as representatives of the state.
The Labor Charter of 1927 had made eminently clear that the organization of labor and the employers of labor taken together constituted
“corporations,” unitary and integral organizations of the forces of national production, and as a consequence, were “legally recognized as
state organs” charged with the responsibilities of imposing discipline on
labor and coordinating production. In general, as was reiterated with
regularity, the corporations were understood to be “responsible to the
state for production.”75
With the onset of the Great Depression, Spirito was convinced that
some discussion concerning forthcoming corporativist developments
should be candidly undertaken. He undertook to anticipate the institutional changes that would contribute to the fulfillment of the promise of
the “Corporate State”—particularly under the conditions of worldwide
economic crisis.
These were the conditions surrounding Spirito’s celebrated communication, “The Individual and the State in the Corporative Economy,” presented before the Second Congress of Syndicalist and Corporativist Studies
held in Ferrara from 5 May through 8 May 1932.76 The communication
75
Carta del lavoro, paras. 6 and 7.
Spirito, “Individuo e stato nell’economia corporativa,” in Capitalismo e corporativismo (Florence: Sansoni, 1933), pp. 3–24, reprinted in Il corporativismo, pp. 351–67.
76
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was prompted by the tensions created by the Great Depression, but turned
on what Spirito held to be the fundamental issue of the nature of corporativism itself.
Before delivering his communication, Spirito took the precaution of providing Mussolini himself with a draft copy for review. On 25 March 1932,
Spirito met with Mussolini and discussed the substance of his intended
address. Mussolini’s accord was unequivocal. He seemed to accept the thesis that history has a “logic,” and that events, in the immediate past, had
so conspired that Italy could ultimately anticipate a “total corporative unification of capital and labor” in terms of its productive system.77
In his communication at the Ferrara conference, Spirito argued that the
syndicalist and corporativist organization of the Fascist state, if it were
to achieve its potential, would have to address unresolved issues within
the very institutions themselves. Spirito addressed the fact that corporative organizations were intrinsically dualistic in character—with labor
and capital each separately collected in their respective organizations—
brought together only to mitigate their differences. An “integral” or “unitary” corporativism would require the supersession of the felt need for
separate organizations for labor and capital.
Spirito argued that with the sale of equity through stocks, capital had
lost much of its independent productive function. Where, in the past, entrepreneurs had invested in industry and devoted their personal assets and
energies to enhance production and improve efficiency—the expansion of
industry, with ownership of equity through anonymous stock purchase,
had impaired the relationship between ownership and responsible management. Spirito spoke of the circumscribed interests of stockholders—a
return on investment—rather than conscientious management of plant
and enterprise. He spoke, correspondingly, of the narrowly focused interests of workers—in wages, rather than production.
He argued that these circumstances created a reality in which the atomized elements involved in production had difficulty synchronizing their
endeavors because of divergent interests.78 Since Actualism’s rationale in
support of Fascist corporativism turned on the identification of individual, group, and state ends,79 Spirito argued that the refraction of interests
produced by prevailing arrangments was not only counterproductive—
but, in the last analysis, immoral.
Spirito maintained that the corporativist arrangements still prevailing
in the 1930s reflected the individualistic biases of liberal economic theory.
77
Spirito, Memorie di un inconsciente, p. 174.
Spirito, “Individuo e stato nell’economia corporativa,” in Il corporativismo, p. 351.
79
See, for example, Spirito, “Regime corporativo”; “La crisi del capitalismo e il sistema
corporativo”; and “Statalismo corporativo,” in Il corporativismo, pp. 389, 397, 433.
78
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As a consequence, whatever was attempted in terms of corporativist interventions into the economy almost always had little more than palliative
effect on what was a fundamentally dysfunctional individualistic productive system.80 He held that the corporativism of the beginning of the 1930s
was “eclectic” rather than consistently Fascist or Actualist. He alluded to
article 7 of the Carta del lavoro, which spoke of private property as a
social responsibility—as signaling the end of the liberal conception of private property.81 He advocated the complete abandonment of the liberal
notion of the amoral, hedonistic, and atomistic homo oeconomicus, arbiter of himself and the sole judge of his own interests in any struggle against
his conationals. He recommended the articulation of a system predicated
on homines oeconomici, collectively oriented—in search of collective
norms and communal moral principles—that would harmonize, foster,
and enhance community goals.82
Spirito went on to argue that given the social character of property,
together with the collectivistic orientation of the state, individual private
property could only be an anachronism. Fascism, he continued, was
charged by history with the resolution of the antinomies that still afflicted
the modern economy of peninsular Italy. Doctrine and practice were beset
by manifest inconsistencies. Stockholders pursued narrow private interests. Administrators were preoccupied with special concerns. Workers
were occupied almost exclusively with their own welfare.
Should enterprise fail, the state undertakes salvage—because business
failure threatens not only individual well-being, but the strength and international stature of the community. Should workers threaten to strike, the
state calls upon the courts to mediate. All of which made evident that
only the state seemed to bear the responsibility for the most fundamental
of collective interests.
Spirito assessed the time as one of transition. Fascist Italy was in the
process of creating the modern state.83 Spirito argued that doctrine, circumstances, and logic recommended the abandonment of the liberal conception of individual private property for the more functional reality of
corporative property—a gradual fusion of capital and labor in the unitary
processes of national production.
Spirito advocated the creation of a system of corporative property in
which working members of the corporations would become stockholders.
All would become workers and workers would become owners in the
80
Spirito, “Economia programmatica,” in Il corporativismo, pp. 412–13.
See the discussion in La concezione fascista dell proprietà privata (edited by the Confederazione fascista dei laboratori dell’agricoltura. Rome: n.p., 1939).
82
Ibid., p. 416.
83
Spirito, “Individuo e stato nell’economia corporativo,” in Il corporativismo, p. 355.
81
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measure of their place in the organic hierarchy of enterprise. Workers
would thus earn a return on enterprise profit and also occupy seats in an
adminstrative council for enterprise to collaborate directly in management. The traditional distinctions between entrepreneurs and workers
would gradually disappear. The reality of the community would rest on
collective interest, collective effort, and collective rewards. “The state, for
its part, would no longer undertake control or intervention from without,
but would always be present within enterprise, since the corporation
would be an organ of the state itself,” thereby making manifest the reality
of the underlying community of interests uniting all the factors of production. The transformation of private property into corporative property
would thereby resolve the unresolved tensions that, in 1932, still separated individual, enterprise, syndicate, corporation, party, and the state.84
The argument turned on the Hegelian conviction that moral fulfillment
of the individual required the fulfillment of the state in a union of the
most fundamental interests of both. In 1932, as acknowledgment of that
conviction, Mussolini requested that Giovanni Gentile write the first part,
the neo-Hegelian “Fundamental Ideas,” of the official Doctrine of Fascism—and the totalitarian Actualist argument became a formal part of
Fascism’s rationale.
Spirito delivered a variant of the Actualist case in the course of the
corporativist conference at Ferrara in that same year, to a storm of criticism. Gentile came to his immediate defense, identifying those in opposition—Roman Catholics, political and economic liberals, and unthinking “superfascists”85—as the enemies of Fascism.86 By that time,
the more or less formal Actualist arguments, in specific support of the
corporativist state, had already begun to make their regular appearance
in Fascist literature.87
84
Ibid., p. 357.
It seems probable that Gentile was referring to Julius Evola, who, as will be argued,
was essentially an anti-Fascist who pretended to “superfascism.” See the discussion in
H. T. Hansen, “Introduction: Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors,” in Julius Evola, Men
among the Ruins: Post-war Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester, Vt.: Inner
Traditions, 2002), pp. 42–43, 50–57.
86
Gentile, “Individuo e stato o la corporazione proprietaria,” Educazione fascista 10
(August 1932), pp. 635–38. Years later, at the close of the Fascist period in Italy, Mussolini
himself identified the same contingents as having been enemies throughout his tenure. See
A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001), chap. 7.
87
See, for example, N. Massimo Fovel, “L’individuo e lo stato nella scienze economica,”
Nuovi studi di diritto economia e politica 3, no. 1 (January–February 1930), pp. 51–67;
“L’individuo e lo stato nell’economia corporativa,” Archivio di studi corporativi, no. 1
(1930), pp. 101–30; “Identificazione dell’individuo e dello stato come attori economici,”
Nuovi studi di diritto, economia e politica 3, nos. 3–4 (March–June 1930), pp. 189–207;
85
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What would emerge out of Spirito’s projected “integral corporativism”
would be a state economically individuated in and through persons, and
collections of persons in syndicates, and corporations—all finding their
political identity, as a national community, in the form of a totalitarian
state. Historically, such a resolution would satisfy those ideological interests that had animated Fascism since its founding. It would supersede the
old socialism—the antinational and antiproductive opponent of nascent
Fascism—“to make its own that which remains alive and productive in
the Bolshevik experience.”88
Spirito saw in his proposals the salvage of whatever was alive in revolutionary socialism. Fascist intellectuals of the period echoed that sentiment
and saw in some of the institutions of the Soviet Union the empirical
confirmation of Spirito’s judgments concerning corporativism.
Spirito identified “integral” and “programmatic” corporativism—an
evolving corporativism that would transform itself into a “true and effective economic government”—as a form of modern socialism. The corporative pyramidal infrastructure that was being erected, for example,
would house those equipped with the expertise necessary to guide the
various sectors of the economy. At the pinnacle there would be a “permanent technical office,” responsible for program projections—uniting all
the elements of production through scientific, indicative planning. Corporativism would unite science with life itself, so that the abstractions characteristic of liberal empirical and academic science would be transformed
into an applied and living revolutionary socialism.89
Throughout the hierarchy of organized labor, from the lowliest employee to the highest technician and functionary in the productive system,
everyone would both contribute to and profit from national enterprise.
The state would not be “a centralized bureaucracy, but would be indistingishable from the organic corporativism which constitutes its substance. . . . The unity of the state would be enriched with all the dynamism
of individual initiative . . . expressing itself through the medium of a unitary will.”90 The individual would finally, and effectively, become identified with the state.
What would result would be a “regulated” and “programmatic” economy that was coherent and goal directed, capable of adjusting to, and
“Intorno al principio formale della politica economica corporativa,” Archivio di studi corporativi, no. 1 (1930), pp. 87–100; Spirito, “La riforma della scienza economica e il concetto di stato,” Nuovi studi di diritto, economia e politica 3, no. 1 (January–February 1930),
pp. 68–72.
88
Spirito, Il corporativismo, p. 359.
89
Spirito, “Economia programmatica,” and “L’economia programmatica corporativa,”
in Il corporativismo, pp. 412–32.
90
Spirito, “L’economia programmatica corporativa,” in Il corporativismo, p. 424.
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mediating, episodic and intersectoral dislocations. It would be a truly national economy, serving the vital interests of all in an international environment of challenge. It could not be a closed economy—but selectively
open to the global community—since the peninsula was dependent on
the international markets for at least a substantial part of the resources
necessary for its basic industries.91
The reaction to Spirito’s analysis was immediate. The meeting of some
six hundred specialists at Ferrara, devoted to the interpretation of the role
and future functioning of the Fascist corporations, was one of the largest
gatherings of political thinkers and economic specialists since the March
on Rome. It marked the beginning of a new phase of the “Revolution”
and clearly engaged the interests of some of Fascist Italy’s most important
leaders. At the conclusion of Spirito’s communication, some of Italy’s
most prominent industrial leaders rose to voice their objections. Even Giuseppe Bottai, then Fascist Minister of Corporations—obviously discomfited—suggested that Spirito had perhaps allowed his argument to take
him beyond the bounds of corporativism.92
Others were less circumspect. Some of the more important leaders of
industry complained that what Spirito advocated was state socialism at
best, or “Bolshevism” at worst. It was said that Spirito had transfigured
Fascism and made of it a wretched imitation of “leftist” excess.93
Although his argument had been welcomed by notables such as Sergio
Panunzio, the response on the part of some distinguished members of the
audience left Spirito concerned. He asked for an audience with Mussolini,
and Mussolini welcomed him on 13 May, less than a week after the conclusion of the conference.
Spirito wished to know if his communication had been “heterodox.”
Mussolini replied in the negative. “Your communication was not heterodox,” Mussolini insisted, “it was perfectly orthodox, entirely defensible
politically and scientifically.”94
91
Some authors have suggested that Spirito was opposed to the autarkic efforts of Fascism. See, for example, Silvio Lanaro, “Appunti sul fascismo ’di sinistra’: La dottrina corporativa di Ugo Spirito,” in Alberto Aquarone and Maurizio Vernassa, eds., Il regime fascista
(Bologna: Il Mulino, 1974), p. 387. That does not seem to be the case. He spoke of Fascist
Italy operating in international markets in order to supply its needs, but Mussolini himself
in speaking of autarky recognized as much. In 1936, responding to the sanctions imposed
on Italy because of its aggression against Ethiopia, Mussolini spoke of his conception of
autarky as “the maximum degree of economic independence for the nation.” Mussolini, “Il
piano regolatore della nuova economia Italiana,” in Oo, vol. 27, p. 242.
92
Giuseppe Bottai, “Al convegno di Ferrara,” in Esperienza corporativa (1929–1935),
2nd ed. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1935), p. 585.
93
See Guido Cavalucci, Il fascismo è sulla via di Mosca? (Rome: Cremonese, 1933).
94
As cited in Spirito, Memorie di un incosciente, p. 177.
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CHAPTER SIX
As was indicated, Mussolini had approved Spirito’s communication before the conference in Ferrara. A few weeks after the conference, Mussolini repeated his judgment once again. The following October, a few short
months after Spirito’s delivery in May, Mussolini once again spoke of his
work on corporativism. He recognized that many had objected to his
anticipation of a corporative planned economy. Mussolini acknowledged
that Spirito had become a “monster” to all those who insisted on clinging
to the remnants of economic liberalism that still survived in the era of the
Great Depression. He went on to allude to Spirito’s animating conviction—the identity of the individual and the state—as “doctrinally orthodox,” and proceeded to send the reader to the Enciclopedia italiana, to
read the insert devoted to “fascism” in order to establish the orthodoxy
of just that conviction. Since the insert appeared over Mussolini’s name,
the reference confirmed Spirito’s Fascist credentials.
Thus, on at least three occasions—one public—Mussolini affirmed
his approval of Spirito’s assessment, documenting its fundamental doctrinal orthodoxy. “No one,” Mussolini insisted, “can deny the clarity of
Spirito’s historic analysis, the vigor of his argument, or the logic of his
conclusions.”95
In the years that followed, Spirito’s sentiments found recurrent expression in Mussolini’s prose. Like Spirito, Mussolini spoke of the twentieth
century as “the century of power and glory of labor.” He spoke of workers
entering “more and more intimately into the productive process. . . .
When I say producers,” he continued, “I do not mean only industrialists
or employers, but I also mean workers.” It was a development, he argued,
that “was imposed by logic and history itself.” He spoke of the “end of
liberal-capitalistic economy . . . an economy aiming at individual profit.”
The Fascist economy would be one “concerned with collective interests.”
In revolutionary Italy, there could be no economic matters that were “exclusively of private or individual concern.” The behavior of individuals,
and groups of individuals, was to fall increasingly under the discipline of
the state. And the state, armed with modern science, Mussolini insisted,
would create multifold possibilities for the Italian peninsula—and while
Italy’s complex economy would have to be managed with prudence, the
future was big with the promise of power, glory, and fulfillment.96
About a month after he identified himself with the thrust and content
of Spirito’s intervention in the Congress in Ferrara, in a major address on
the corporative state Mussolini spoke unhesitatingly about the passing of
capitalism and the abject inadequacy of liberal economic theory. He spoke
of the increasing size of enterprise as nullifying all the putative benefits of
95
96
Mussolini, “Segnalazione,” in Oo, vol. 26, pp. 68–69.
Mussolini, “Discorso agli operai di Milano,” in Oo, vol. 26, pp. 356–57.
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private ownership that were supposed to redound to the community.97 He
spoke, without hesitancy, of a planned, regulated and controlled economy
for Fascist Italy.98
At the same time, he characterized Fascism as a system which fostered
and sustained both political and economic discipline through the agencies
of a single political party and the totalitarian state. The totalitarian state
would “absorb the energy, interests and aspiration of the people, transforming and uplifting them.” The people would “live in an atmosphere
of strong ideal tension.”99
It is impossible not to recognize the influence of Actualism and the
thought of Spirito in Mussolini’s prose. Where, at the founding of Fascism
in 1919, he spoke of “capitalism” as having only begun its evolution, of
a dogged defense of individuality, and making recourse to the “Manchestrian state” of restricted function100—by the beginning of the 1930s, Mussolini spoke of the “totalitarian” state, its anticapitalistic “planned” economy, and the fundamental identity of individual interests with those of
the state.
Through the first years of the 1930s, the Great Depression compelled
a Fascist response. There was an almost immediate proliferation of consorzi, enti, and istituti. At first, a number of enterprises came together in
defensive voluntary associations—consortia—not unlike German cartels.
In June 1932, these consortia were placed under government control. The
year before, in November 1931, the Istituto mobiliare italiano (IMI) had
been formed, designed to provide financial assistance to those enterprises
threatened by bankruptcy as a result of the critical collapse of domestic
and foreign demand. Almost immediately, the Società finanziaria italiana
(Sofondit) was established, intended to assist the nation’s financial institutions to weather the dislocations. In the first months of 1933, the Istituto
di riconstruzione industriale (IRI) was created in order to provide longterm loans to industrial undertakings financed with government-guaranteed bonds.
While these were originally salvage operations, with the IRI serving as
a transient holding company for industrial equities, very soon the state
97
Mussolini, “Discorso per lo stato corporativo,” in Oo, vol. 26, pp. 87, 89–90.
Mussolini spoke of the “piano regolatore (the regulative plan)” of the corporative state
in a speech before the National Assembly of Corporations on 23 March 1936, “Il piano
regolatore della nuova economia Italiana,” in Oo, vol. 27, pp. 241, 244. Thereafter the
terms “plan” and “program” or “programmatic plan” were regularly used to describe the
organization and activity of the Fascist economy.
99
Ibid., p. 96.
100
See Mussolini, “Il primo discorso alla camera dei deputati,” in Oo, vol. 16, p. 445;
“Il fascismo e gia un partito,” in Oo, vol. 17, p. 158; “Logica e demagogia,” in Oo, vol.
14, p. 86; “Tra il vecchio e il nuovo ’navigare necesse,’ ” in Oo, vol. 14, pp. 231–32. See
98
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became majority stockholder in hundreds of diverse enterprises. By 1937,
the holdings of both the IMI and the IRI were systematized, allowing the
state to control, in large measure, the financial and industrial activity of
Italy. Credit was extended by the state, and five major sectors of the economy were drawn together into five parastate entities: Finsider (iron and
steel), Finmeccanica (mechanical industries), STET (telephonic communications), Finmare (shipbuilding), and Finelettrica (electricity)
Below the five major sectors perhaps as many as two hundred industrial
entities were collected, either directly or partially controlled by the state.
These entities shared information with the various corporative agencies
already in existence, and they were all supervised by the state, indirectly
by the Fascist party, and directly by Mussolini and the Grand Council of
Fascism.101
By 1938, after Italy, for all intents and purposes, had emerged from the
effects of the international depression, the entities under the control of
the IRI proceeded to produce 67 percent of Italy’s ferrous minerals, 77
percent of its cast iron, and 45 percent of its steel. About 80 percent of
all shipbuilding undertaken on the peninsula was done under the auspices
of Finmare —and Finmeccanica was producing 40 percent of all machine
products. The major part of all infrastructural development was the product of the efforts of similar parastate entities.102 In effect, by the end of
the 1930s, the economy of Fascist Italy was the most extensively state
controlled in all of Europe—with the exception of the Soviet Union.
Fascism responded to the rise in unemployment that accompanied the
international business depression by undertaking vast public works. The
comprehensive land reclamation program together with the expansion of
public works devoted to the communications and transportation infrastructure, begun before the depression, were reformulated and expanded
in 1933.103
While many of the industrialized nations of the West undertook programs of business salvage as a consequence of the Great Depression, Fascist Italy went further and effectively alienated the property of vast sectors
of the economy and subjected much of the rest to partial or complete
control by the state. By the mid-1930s, almost all credit availability, and
almost all heavy industrial activity, was controlled, directly or indirectly,
by the state.
A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), chap. 9.
101
See the account in Giulio Scagnetti, Gli enti di privilegio nell’economia corporativa
Italiana (Padua: CEDAM, 1942).
102
See Caizzi, Storia dell’industria Italiana, pp. 506–12.
103
See the account in Arturo Tofanelli, ed., Le opere del fascismo nel decennale (Milan:
Istituto editoriale nazionale, 1934).
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While all this transpired, Mussolini gave increasing evidence of an interest in embarking on colonial expansion in East Africa in the search for a
secure source of raw materials. The form that expansion assumed was
aggression against Ethiopia. The Ethiopian war began in October 1935,
to last about seven months. At about the same time, Italy became increasingly involved in the domestic strife in Spain that was to conclude only in
1939. At the same time, Italy became a partner with National Socialist
Germany in what was conceived a struggle against the incursion of the
Soviet Union into Western Europe.
In the course of all that, Italy was drawn increasingly close to National
Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan. The anti-Comintern pact, and the
subsequent “Pact of Steel,” signaled the imminence of a European war of
global impact into which Italy was to be inexorably drawn.
Behind and within all that, the Italian economy underwent substantial
change. Those domestic economic changes reflected a great deal of the
thought of Ugo Spirito. Private property no longer enjoyed a privileged
position in Italy. There was an abandonment of the critical essentials of
liberal economic policy. Control over policy more and more emanated
from the center—from the Fascist Grand Council and Mussolini himself.
The logic of the arrangements, although often precipitated by contingencies, shared obvious features with the rationale provided by Actualism,
in general, and Spirito, in particular.
Like all ideological formulations, actualization of the specifics of Spirito’s “integral corporativism” was systematically obstructed by events.
Nonetheless, Spirito’s ideas had resonance not only with Mussolini, but
with the youth of Fascism. One could easily see the approximation of
those ideas in the developments that followed the conference in Ferrara.
The abandonment of liberal economic modalities, the transformation of
the purposes of enterprise from private benefit to social utility, the rejection of the essentials of traditional industrial capitalism, the rapid expansion of state influence into all aspects of the economy, all suggested Actualist influence. Whatever Mussolini’s relationship to Spirito after the mid1930s tells us nothing about the enduring influence of Spirito’s ideas on
Mussolini as well as on a substantial number of young Fascists.
Those Fascists were to carry Actualist ideas into the last tragic months
of the Second World War, there to be consumed, together with their ideas
about integral corporativism, along with Fascism itself.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sergio Panunzio and the Maturing
of Fascist Doctrine
IN THE YEARS that were to follow the conference at Ferrara where Ugo
Spirito, amidst the challenge of the Great Depression, had attempted to
anticipate the future of corporativism, Fascism was to put together the
institutions that were to carry it into the Second World War. To Mussolini, whatever its normative rationale, corporativism was essentially an
instrument of management and control. Through its instrumentalities,
he was to seek to regulate industrial capitalism; to direct its enterprise in
the search for surrogates to supply the resources absent from the Italian
peninsula1—to achieve the “maximum economic autonomy of the nation; a necessary premise and a fundamental guarantee of its political
independence and of its strength.” He spoke of bringing “key industries”
under the ambit of the state. He referred to the provisions of the Carta
del lavoro, which provided for state dominance of industry should state
interests be engaged. And he spoke of bringing the nation’s financial
institutions under state supervision. “The great shipping companies,” he
went on, “have passed under state control.” Autarky, he concluded, was
necessary for the protection of the nation—to insulate the peninsula
from the aggression of those nations rich in both material abundance
and arrogance.2
No one had foreseen these developments: neither the full extent of the
international economic dislocation beginning in 1929, nor the impositions of sanctions on Italy as a consequence of its foray into colonialism
in the mid-1930s. Certainly, Spirito’s assessment of how corporativism
would develop was, in measure, prescient—but major features had
eluded him. After 1935, Spirito, for a variety of reasons both political
and philosophical, no longer played as public a role in the front ranks
of Fascist intellectuals.3
1
See Luigi Lojacono, ed., L’Independenza economica italiana (Milan: Hoepli, 1937);
Angelo Tarchi, Prospettive autarchiche (Florence: CYA, 1941).
2
Mussolini, “Alla terza assemblea generale delle corporazioni,” Opera omnia (Florence:
La fenice, 1953–65. Hereafter Oo), vol. 28, pp. 175, 178–79, 181.
3
Spirito, Memorie di un incosciente (Milan: Rusconi, 1977), pp. 182–85. He continued
to work with other intellectuals, particularly the Actualists still prominent in the regime.
T H E M AT U R I N G O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
141
Sergio Panunzio, on the other hand, had more closely followed the juridical and institutional evolution of Fascist corporativism. While Spirito’s thought was panoramic and anticipatory in character, that of Panunzio was more detailed and meticulous—and by choice, followed, assessed,
and influenced, rather than anticipated, developments. He always characterized himself as “pragmatic,”4 and while always identifying himself as
philosphically “idealist” and as antimaterialist, he was content to remain
a Kantian of sorts and a more orthodox Hegelian, unprepared or illequipped, to fully proceed to Actualism.5 None of that is to say that Panunzio actively opposed himself to Actualism. Like most intellectuals, he
had his reservations concerning particular Actualist formulations—but in
essentials, there was remarkable agreement.
Both Gentileans and Panunzio were statists—according philosophical
and political priority to the state. As a consequence, they were all collectivists, opposing the “atomic” individualism of political and economic
liberalism that reduced the function of the state to that of a night watchman commissioned to protect life and property. They were all nationalists
in the sense that they conceived the nation as the contemporary vehicle
of individual self-realization. They were all antiparliamentarian, holding
parliaments to be, at best, ineffectual and, at worst, the source of corruption. They were all emphatic moralists, insisting that the state had the
pedagogical obligation of training human beings to selfless virtue. As a
consequence, Fascist rule was seen as ecclesiastic, epistemarchic, and pedagogic in essential character.6 Like religionists, philosophers and pedagogues saw the use of force justified only when in the service of virtue.7
Panunzio, like the Gentileans, conceived society as immanent at the very
core of humankind.8 Actualists and non-Actualists, as Fascists, were all
4
Panunzio, “Il sindacalismo nazionale,” Lavoro d’Italia, 12 May 1923, reprinted in
Stato nazionale e sindacati (Milan: Imperia, 1924), p. 115.
5
Panunzio always held that “facts are superior to ideas.” Panunzio, “La rappresentanza
di classe,” Rinnovamento 2, no. 7 (13 August 1919), in Stato nazionale e sindicati, p. 46.
See Panunzio, “Il sindacalismo nazionale,” Stato nazionale e sindicato, pp. 102, n. 1; and
“Che cos’è il liberalismo?” Critica fascista 1, no. 1 (15 June 1923), in Stato nazionale e
sindicato, p. 195; “Educazione politica,” Popolo d’Italia (29 March 1916), in Stato nazionale e sindicata, p. 29, n.1.
6
See the discussion in Panunzio, Appunti di dottrina generale dello stato: Realtà e idea
dello stato (Rome: Castellani, 1934), p. 201.
7
See Panunzio’s comments in “Il sindacalismo nazionale,” Lavoro d’Italia, 12 May
1923, reprinted in Appunti di dottrina generale dello stato, p. 114; and his entire works, Il
concetto della guerra giusta (Campobasso: Colitti e figlio, 1917); and Diritto, forza e violenza: Lineamenti di una teoria della violenza (Bologna: Cappelli, 1921).
8
See Panunzio’s reference to society’s very immanence among human beings, rather than
as an artefact composed of the “dust of individuals.” “Il sindacalismo nazione” in Stato
nazionale e sindacati, pp. 104–5. Panunzio even uses the characterization of society and the
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elitists in the sense that they were “epistemarchs”—advocates of rule by
those most gifted, most knowlegeable, and most committed.9 All subscribed to rule by the hegemonic single party, and in appropriate circumstances, rule by a single, charismatic individual.
In effect, it shall be argued that, whatever differences marked Panunzio
off from Actualism, they were incidental and largely circumstantial.
When Western critics suggest that Fascism was informed by a “contradictory” and “inconsistent” doctrine, they expand upon real and fancied
differences between ideologues such as Gentile and Panunzio and entirely
neglect the central core of beliefs that united everyone around the Partito
nazionale fascista and Mussolini.
It is in that sense that the differences between Spirito and Panunzio
should be understood. There were, of course, real differences. Spirito addressed himself to the implicit “logic” of corporativism, and sought to
anticipate the changes “immanent” in the system. Panunzio, on the other
hand and throughout his intellectual life, sought to understand the evolving arrangements, and convey that understanding to those who were to
live under Fascism’s dominion. His was a more fundamental concern than
simply taking the measure of corporativism and anticipating its future.
Panunzio had charged himself with the responsibility of providing comprehensive insights into the working of the system.
In fact, by the time of his death on 8 October 1944, Panunzio had
delivered the most exhaustive and comprehensive account of the mechanics of corporativism then available. As a consequence, Panunzio has been
ranked, by those familiar with Fascist Italy, as a major theorist of corporativism, the equal of Giovanni Gentile in the intellectual defense of
the regime.10
state not being external to human beings, but rather in interiore homine—the Latin typically
employed by Gentile to reflect the same concept.
9
See Panunzio, “Politica e educazione,” in Stato nazionale e sindacato, p. 145.
10
See the comments of Susanna de Angelis, “Il corporativismo giuridico nell’opera di
Sergio Panunzio,” Storia contemporanea, 14, nos. 4–5 (October 1983), pp. 695–96. The
relationship between Gentile and Panunzio was complicated on a personal as well as on a
theoretical level. With respect to the latter, see the comments by Francesco Perfetti, ed., of
Sergio Panunzio: Il fondamento giuridico del fascismo (Rome: Bonacci, 1987), pp. 132–33.
Panunzio, for example, objected to some of the features of Gentile’s conception of the state
as “ethical.” While accepting the identification of the state as “ethical,” Panunzio maintained the necessity of preserving the “juridical moment” distinct from that which was “metajuridical” or “moral” in order to better protect elements of the existing society. He also
entertained reservations concerning the “identification” of the syndicates with the state—
advocating, instead, their “subordination” to the state. These kinds of differences certainly
had implications for conduct, but it would be hard to argue that they were fundamental, or
that they rendered the doctrine of Fascism, “contradictory.” See the treatment in Perfetti,
in Il fondamento giuridico del fascismo, ibid., pp. 72 and 96 n. 182. Compare Panunzio,
Lo stato di diritto (Ferrara: Tadei, 1921), pp. 115–19.
T H E M AT U R I N G O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
143
For Panunzio, the First World War had established the contemporary
primacy of the nation as the association that could evoke the entire range
of sentiments necessary to mobilize human energy to historic purpose.11
Even before his formal membership in the Partito nazionale fascista, Panunzio had spoken of Italy’s underdevelopment, its lack of natural resources and capital; the necessity of the expansion of plant on the peninsula and the encouragement of the nation’s industrial production under
corporativist auspices.12 That was the hard issue that faced the revolution—it would have to establish a “new regime of production.”13 Panunzio anticipated that the emerging revolutionary system would meet such
demands by putting together arrangements that he identified as a union
of “statism and syndicalism—with the first providing the ends, and the
second the means.”14
By the early 1930s, Panunzio was preparing a comprehensive exposition of Fascist doctrine—together with its argued vindication. As an academic, trained in philosophy and social science, he began with a catalog
of stipulative definitions of those terms he held to be essential to his exposition. In social science, such stipulative definitions are never held to be
true—nor did Panunzio hold them to be so. They were useful to his account.15 They were employed in order to reduce the vagueness and ambiguity of the terms as they are employed in ordinary speech.
Panunzio defined society as a collection of persons, arranged in functionally related configuration, engaged in activities governed by some set
of explicit or implicit rules of conduct. A society, as a system governed by
rules of conduct—sanctioned as laws—provides the material foundation
for a state. The state—as a politico-juridical reality—is a particular kind
of society, one in which a selected minority exercises sovereignty, control,
or imperium, that is to say, the faculty of issuing authoritative commands.16 A society, per se, refers to a functional collection of persons that
11
Lo stato di diritto, pp. 102–4.
“We are poor in resources, we have very little occasion for savings and capital accumulation . . . and scant capital. We must break out of the cage that renders it impossible for us
to develop. . . . We must be frugal, parsimonious, modest in consumption, in pleasures,
because without that, we can never achieve greatness. . . . Italy will remain poor, underdeveloped and overpopulated. The axiom of Fascism and Fascist sociology is production and its
increase.” Panunzio, Che cos’è il fascismo (Milan: Alpes, 1924), pp. 26, 29, 40, 53; see pp.
24–25. See Panunzio, “Un programma d’azione,” Il Rinnovamento 1, no. 2 (15 March
1919), pp. 87, 89; and Lo stato fascista (Bologna: Cappelli, 1925), p. 67.
13
Panunzio, Che cos’è il fascismo, pp. 63, 64.
14
Panunzio, “La rappresentanza di classe,” in Stato nazionale e sindacati, p. 37.
15
Panunzio, Appunti di dottrina generale dello stato, pp. 238–50.
16
See the conceptual distinctions offered by Panunzio, ibid., pp. 130–31, 249. For the
purposes of the present exposition, “sovereignty” is used to signify no more than political
power or control.
12
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is innocent of sovereignty, while a state is a particular kind of society—
specifically characterized by sovereignty. In effect, it is the state that provides peculiar form to society.17
For Panunzio, a nation is also a specific kind of society, empirically
characterized by an interrelated collection of persons sharing territorial
and ethnic origin, a traditional culture, and a common history. A nation
is an ordered society—spiritually united by the state. The unity provided
by the state is predicated on a shared morality and factually enhanced by
a general obedience to law that characterizes its citizens.18 Nationality
refers to those persons, united by territory, culture, and spirituality, who
are subject to the laws of a given state. They are the people19—and constitute the matter of which the state is the form.20 Even where people do not
constitute a nation, the state may rule as the agent, or bearer, of sovereignty. Thus, where diverse peoples are conquered or come together and
are governed by a given state, we speak of “empires.”21
For Panunzio, the state as the bearer of sovereignty was considered an
“eternal absolute” in its “spiritual and ideal essence.”22 What that meant
was that we are counseled to consider all assemblies of functionally interrelated persons as being, in some real sense, ruled. The agency of sovereign rule—whoever its role-holders might be at any given place, time,
or circumstance, or however rule is exercised—is a manifest or implicit
“state.”23
In effect, Panunzio’s definition of the state was a theoretical convenience, a term that would be applied in any circumstance when an organized aggregate is subject to command, dominion, or power. The term,
although suggested by experience, was not empirical. It was a definition.
It belonged to the philosophical and moral analysis of human history.
Thus, the term might be applied, in principle, Panunzio affirms, wherever
an elite, of whatever kind, exercises sovereign command—in primitive
families, tribes, confederations, city-states and/or kingdoms—over any
organized body of persons. When such a body is united by history and
17
For Gentile, the “state is the concrete form of the life of a people.” Gentile, Discorsi
di religione, 3rd ed. (1920; Florence: Sansoni, 1955), p. 27.
18
Panunzio, Popolo, nazione, stato (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1933), pp. 17–19.
19
Panunzio fully recognized the multiple uses of the term “people” (see ibid., pp. 46–49,
n. 28). His stipulative use served exposition. It was not designed to reflect “truth.”
20
See the similar analysis in Panunzio, Il sentimento dello stato (Rome: Littorio, 1929),
pp. 101–8.
21
See Panunzio’s discussion of Austria-Hungary, where he identified the “sentiment of
the state,” but found the “sentiment of nationality” absent. See Panunzio, Popolo, nazione,
stato, p. 20.
22
Ibid., p. 79.
23
See the discussion and qualifications in Panunzio, Appunti di dottrina generale dello
stato, pp. 341–43.
T H E M AT U R I N G O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
145
culture, and occupies territory of sufficient size, it is identified by the modern term “nation.”24
Throughout his account, Panunzio employed the terms “spiritual” and
“spirituality,” intended to sensitize his audience to the fact that he considered obedience to law, however much reinforced by conditioning, to be a
fundamentally voluntary, hence moral, act. The state, therefore, was a
moral agency—and the nation a “spiritual” product.
All of this was part of the idealist interpretation of individual and collective life for which Panunzio had opted around the time of the First
World War. Throughout the remainder of his life he remained influenced
by Kantianism, tending to favor some form of neo-Hegelianism in his
philosophical interpretation of individual and collective morality.25 Needless to say, it was that orientation that governed his interpretation of the
Fascist state.26
Beneath the idealist interpretation, Panunzio entertained standard social science conceptions. He was prepared, as a case in point, to identify
what he called “the sentiment of nationality” with the in-group amity
concerning which he had written in his youth.27 Associated, originally,
with sociological positivism and Marxist class warfare, Panunzio adapted
the notion of “in-group amity” to his idealist analysis of the nationalism
and statism of Fascism.
Like Gentile, Panunzio was prepared to acknowledge sentiment as an
element that underlay moral choice.28 Thus the sentiment of nationality
and of the state were psychological and behaviorial antecedents to mature moral judgment. For Panunzio, nationality was originally associated
with an in-group sentiment. Like the sentiment of the state, national
sentiment matured—under appropriate circumstances—from sentiment
into a fundamental moral commitment. In its first manifestation, that
moral commitment was predicated on the cultural unity that initially
defined a people.
24
Ibid., pp. 79–82.
As has been suggested, this included a readiness to identify not only with Hegelian, but
with Gentilean insights. Panunzio’s references to Gentile and Gentile’s works are found in
all his major works. See, for example, Panunzio, Popolo, nazione, stato, pp. 35, 36, 55 n.
39; Panunzio, Il sentimento dello stato, pp. 70, 77 n. 36, 86 and 87 nn. 38 and 39, 134,
136 n. 3, 154 n. 9, 230.
26
Panunzio, Il sentimento dello stato, pp. 232–33.
27
Panunzio speaks of the “natural tendency” of human beings to seek associated life
among “similars.” See Panunzio, Appunti di dottrina generale dello stato, p. 340.
28
See Gentile, “Il sentimento,” Introduzione alla filosofia (Rome: Treves-TreccaniTumminelli, 1931), pp. 38–67; and Discorsi di religione, pp. 89–95; A. James Gregor, “Giovanni Gentile, Contemporary Analytic Philosophy, and the Concept of Political Obligation,” in Il pensiero di Giovanni Gentile (Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia Italiana, 1977),
pp. 445–57.
25
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Just as it proved to be the case with Actualists, the entire notion of a
national cultural and moral unity provides something like commonsense
grounds for Panunzio’s discussion of J. J. Rousseau’s conception of the
“general will”—a will that is that of the national community in its entirety, rather than a summing of its component individual wills. Like that
undertaken by Actualists, Panunzio’s analysis of Rousseau’s general will
reveals a great deal about his own, as well as Fascism’s, convictions concerning the state.29 Once again, because contemporary historians of political ideas have largely neglected the relationship to Fascist thought to that
of Rousseau, a further review recommends itself.
Since their appearance, Rousseau’s works have received disparate treatment at the hands of commentators. For some, the notion of a general
will, as distinct from the empirical will expressed in the randomized
samples typical of modern polling, has been dealt with as though it were
akin to what Christians identify as the “inner voice of conscience.” Sometimes the general will is compared to the a priori criteria employed to
distinguish good from evil. For some, the general will is evidenced in the
behavior of associated human beings—as in the spontaneous obedience
to rules that govern all organized associations whether their purpose be
piety, charity, war, savagery, or criminal practice. For others, the general
will represents a will, immanent in humankind, that underlies the potential for unanimity that, in our own time, provides the “driving force” of
totalitarianism.30
For Panunzio, Rousseau’s general will was conceived a figure of speech
having moral reference. It was a term that alluded to a will—a calculated
disposition to act—that presumably has the historic community as its subject. It is a will innocent of individual considerations, interests, preferences, prejudices, and passions. It is a common, not an average, or modal,
will. It is the product of moral perfection—a perfection that assures that
however the general will is taken to apply to the individual, it would apply
equally to anyone.31
The general or common will may be discerned only if a community is
prepared to undertake the effort. What is equally clear to Panunzio is that
only a few human beings are fully prepared by training and disposition
to either identify it or sustain it when identified. Like Rousseau, Panunzio
dismissed the notion that such a will can find expression in popular elections in which individuals vote their particular preoccupations, their party
affiliations, their ego concerns, and/or their material interests.
29
Most of the following discussion is taken from Panunzio, Lo stato di diritto, pp.
102–15.
30
J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1960), p. 6.
31
See Panunzio, La politica di Sismondi (Rome: Ugo Pinnaro, 1926), pp. 22–23.
T H E M AT U R I N G O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
147
It is in dealing with the attainment of moral perfection that Panunzio
refers his reader to Rousseau’s general discussion of the moral maturation of individuals.32 There Rousseau takes his reader through the stages
of the individual’s moral progression, tracing the infant’s love of self as
it expands to a broader sense of love that includes all those persons, and
all those circumstances, that are life-enhancing.33 Commencing with the
nuclear family, the circle of expanding and enlightened self-interest
comes to include the community, the nation, international confederations, and, finally, humanity.34 Carefully cultivated by both sentiment
and reason, the circle of moral identification ultimately comes to include
our antecedents and prospective progeny—all of whom, in one sense or
another, have influenced, influence or are expected to influence our full
moral realization.
Given such an assessment, the disposition to behave in a fashion that
satisfies the interests of all—those deceased, living and as yet unborn—
finds expression in the morally perfected general will, a will whose imperatives are more demanding than any that might derive from the unanimous interests of any living community of individuals. The general will is
therefore fundamentally different from the measured will of any empirical
community—sharing its essence with the Gentilean will of the “transcendental self.” Understood in such a fashion, Rousseau’s entire notion of a
general will is ultimately based on an unmistakable form of transcendental idealism—in which the full self-actualization of the individual inextricably involves his or her selfless commitment to a universal community
of similars.35 That community, and those lesser communities of which it
is composed, constitute “ethical organisms.” In the contemporary world,
the agency that provides for the lawful ordering of such “organisms” is
the “ethical state.”36
This analysis, as Panunzio fully acknowledges, is remarkably similar to
that of Hegelians, neo-Hegelians, and Gentileans. Panunzio’s differences
from each and all of them turn on his special analyses of specific concepts.37 Panunzio insists, for example, on a “moment,” or a stage in the
32
See J. J. Rousseau, Emile; or Treatise on Education (New York: D. Appleton, 1914),
bk. 4.
33
See Panunzio’s reference, Lo stato di diritto, p. 109 n. 1.
34
See the discussion concerning international bodies such as the League of Nations and
their moral relevance in this context. Panunzio, Introduzione alla Società delle Nazioni (Ferrara: Taddei, 1920), pt. 2.
35
Panunzio, Lo stato del diritto, pp. 111–12.
36
Ibid., pp. 117–22.
37
Panunzio does not object to the notion of an “ethical state.” What he concerns himself
with is a number of distinctions that he feels Hegelians and Actualists fail to consider. See
ibid., 134–36, 139–41 and chap. 6.
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analysis, when the state is understood, juridically, as the defender of individual rights. Below the level of the “ethical organism,” the “people” are
disaggregated into individual components—each the equal of any other—
with each protected by law. This is the stato del diritto, the juridical state,
an Hegelian moment in Panunzio’s entire conception of the more expansive and inclusive ethical state.
Thus, while the nation is treated, juridically, as a functional organism—
with each component individual equal before the law—for moral and
political purposes, the nation constitutes a single, united community, possessed of a unique state “personality,” possessed of a general will, having
continuity over time and beyond the lives of individuals. The nation is an
“ethical organism,” finding expression as an “ethical state,” in the Hegelian sense.38
Panunzio traced similar concepts in the early-ninteenth-century work
of J. C. Sismondi. He held Sismondi’s “common” will to be derivative of
Rousseau’s general will—with both sharing clear affinities with the political and ethical concepts developed in Hegel’s idealist doctrine of the state.
The common or general will was understood to represent a will that was
not only the immanent, perfected will of all living persons, but the will of
our ancestors and of those as yet unborn. Only such a will would be an
“objective” and “moral” will—because only such a will would be impersonal and universal. While the general will is the immanent will of all,
discerning the full implications of such a will, with unclouded vision, can
only be left to those very few possessed of the training and character
sufficient to the purpose.39
The discernment involved would be very much like seeing the truth of
complex mathematical formulae. Many may fail to perceive such truths,
but once seen, such truths are unproblematic. That the many may fail to
see such truths in those circumstances cannot count as evidence of the
errancy of those truths, but rather of the dullness of the average person.
In that sense, Panunzio was always an “elitist.”40 As a syndicalist during
the years before the First World War, he was familiar with all the literature
that argued that society was moved, and history was fashioned, by minorities leading masses.41 As has been suggested, his first works were dedicated to the “aristocracy” that would lead the workers’ movement to
revolution. After the First World War, one of his first publications as a
38
Panunzio, Popolo, nazione, stato, pp. 27–28.
Ibid., p. 22.
40
See the comments of Susanna de Angelis, “Sergio Panunzio: Rivoluzione e/o stato dei
sindacati,” Storia contemporanea 11, no. 6 (December 1980), p. 971.
41
For a brief discussion of some of the literature advocating various forms of elitism with
which Panunzio must have been familiar, see A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism:
The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), pp. 39–49.
39
T H E M AT U R I N G O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
149
Fascist was a brief political biography of Italo Balbo, the condottiero of
the Fascist action squads, the conqueror of Ferrara, Bologna, and Rovigo,
the leader of men and the master of masses.42
Panunzio understood history, in all its complexity, to be a “spiritual”
product, a function of singular actors working in singular circumstances.
He spoke of heroes and statesmen who shaped events. They did not serve
as representatives of individuals or aggregates of individuals; they were
the “representatives” of the moral purposes of history.43 They spoke with
the authority of the general will. Possessed of the moral vision implied
in Rousseau’s notion of an objective and immanent general will, such
individuals are the natural leaders of the ethical state.
By the early 1930s, the philosophical rationale for the Fascist state had
been completed. The identification of the nation as the vehicle of selffulfillment44 left only one further substitution to make the case for Fascist
totalitarian rule—-the identification of one person as embodying, through
his rule, the interests of the entire nation and its informing state.
Gentile was convinced—as were many in his intellectual environment—
that history moved through the medium of unique leaders moving masses
to moral purpose. Through such leaders, the “particularity” of individuals was to be fused into an “immanence” that gave expession to the culture, economics, politics, and history of a people. The process of fusing a
nation into an infrangible unity required the presence of a man, or a minority of men, “who represent the tendencies already apparent in a people, [together with] already operant forces . . . having a solid foundation
in political reality.”45 If Italy was to be seen, once more, “as having value
in the world,” it would require a “sense of religious mission,” and a
“sense of sacrifice,” to be aroused and sustained among the masses by
“charismatics.”46
That necessitated the presence of “intuitive leaders,” “geniuses,” “heroes,” “providential spirits,” who “embodied” the real will of an historic
people in their leadership—thereby becoming the “conscience and the will
42
Panunzio, Italo Balbo (Milan: Imperia, 1923).
Panunzio, Lo stato del diritto, pp. 159–60.
44
“Whoever sees in corporativism only an economic conception or solely political economy, fails to understand it. . . .This economic revolution completes the spiritual development of the individual and of society.” Mussolini, “Corporativism,” in Oo, vol. 26, p. 173.
Panunzio recognized that one of the major functions of the “ethical state” was to cultivate
the development of individuals. Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, pp. 66–67.
45
See Gentile, “Il significato della vittoria” and “L’esempio del governo,” in Dopo la
vittoria: Nuovi frammenti politici (Rome: La Voce, 1920), pp. 5, 9, 71.
46
Gentile, Discorsi di religione, p. 7. Roberto Michels spoke specifically of “charismatic
leaders” in speaking of Mussolini. See Roberto Michels, First Lectures in Political Sociology
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1949), chap. 6.
43
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CHAPTER SEVEN
of all.”47 They were capable of correctly assessing the character of their
time, and the character of their peoples, in order to effectively mobilize
them to their tasks.48
Such a unique leader could speak for an entire people in what Fascists
were to call an “authoritarian, centralized democracy.”49 The common will
would be “democratically” expressed in a series of intersecting economic
and political institutions in what Panunzio described as a “popular regime
in which the people are directly, rather than indirectly, represented.”50
The fully developed argument was both philosophic (or moral) as well
as empirical. Its critical element, that specific individuals might effectively
represent the general will of a given population, was expressed, and defended, by Panunzio in philosophic and empirical argument. He held that
it could be expressed and confirmed empirically. Some of the most capable
Fascist intellectuals agreed, and sought to provide just that.51 Whatever
the case, the proposition was critical to Fascism’s rationale.
Thus, by the early 1930s, Panunzio had fleshed out the normative and
empirical vindication of the Fascist corporative state. Panunzio could provide expanded meaning and moral character to Fascist doctrinal statements. When the Carta del lavoro affirmed that “spiritually” the “Italian
nation is an organism . . . a moral, political and economic unity that fully
[integralmente] realizes itself in the Fascist state,” Panunzio’s prose endowed its seeming opacity with more intelligible meaning. When the official Dottrina del fascismo appeared in 1932, Panunzio’s works—perhaps
more than any others—unpacked its central concepts. Panunzio gave public meaning to those parts of the Dottrina that remained mercurial. When
the Dottrina spoke of human beings as “individuals” who are, at once,
“the nation and fatherland,” bound by moral ligaments to both past and
future generations, the meaning was revealed and enlarged by Panunzio’s
accounts. Compatible with Actualist social philosophy, Panunzio’s rendering presented Gentilean concepts in the more familiar language of history and social science.
By the early 1930s, Panunzio had committed himself to writing a “general theory” of the Fascist state—to answer all the questions that re47
Gentile, “Idee fondamentali,” in Dottrina del fascismo (Milan: Hoepli, 1935), para. 9.
The section was signed by Mussolini, but was written by Gentile and lightly revised by
Mussolini.
48
Gentile, Fascismo e cultura (Milan: Treves, 1928), p. 47; Origini e dottrina del fascismo (Rome: Libreria del Littorio, 1929), p. 23.
49
Typical of this argument is Bruno Spampanato, Democrazia fascista (Rome: Politca
nuova, 1933); See Panunzio’s version, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, pp. 29–30.
50
Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, pp. 106–7, 136.
51
See, for example, the effort by Michels, First Lectures in Political Sociology, chap. 6;
see chap. 4.
T H E M AT U R I N G O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
151
mained in the wake of the appearance of the Dottrina.52 Panunzio clearly
intended to build on his preceding work, and by the end of the decade
published the second, enlarged edition of his Teoria generale dello stato
fascista.53
His Teoria generale was perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of
Fascism as a social and political doctrine we have available. While there
were other major apologetic works,54 written by authors of competence
and integrity, none were as broad in scope, nor as detailed in delivery, as
that provided by Panunzio.
In his Teoria generale, Panunzio touched on all aspects of Fascist ideology.55 He made sufficient reference to the subjective and dialectical process
of coming to know the world and its properties as spirit—consciousness—
to identify him as an epistemological and, perhaps, ontological idealist.56
Throughout his work, he made regular and affirming references to Hegel
and Italian Hegelians, ranging from Bertrando Spaventa to the lesser neoHegelians of the end of the ninteenth century.
In his account, Panunzio spoke of philosophy as being the first, and
most fundamental, part of his exposition.57 And while there is little elaboration of the specifically philosophical grounding of his exposition, there
are sufficient references to the “formation of the moral consciousness of
humankind” to make evident what he conceived to be the ultimate purpose of human communion.58 He spoke of a spiritual process that informed history and the evolution of the state. He spoke of the historical
and “dialectical process of the realization of the Fascist state,” as proceeding through a series of “spiritual and ethical moments” that began with
the individual, to extend itself to the family, to the communities that composed the nation, until all were incorporated in the state—to ultimately
achieve fulfillment in moral perfection for all.59
52
Panunzio, Il sentimento dello stato, pp. 10–11. One cannot escape the impression that
Panunzio sometimes found Gentile’s expositions impenetrable, and that he, Panunzio,
sought to supply Fascism a more immediately persuasive rationale.
53
Padua: CEDAM, 1939. 2nd, enlarged edition.
54
Among the major works, see Carlo Costamagna, Dottrina del fascismo, 2nd, enlarged
ed. (Turin: UTET, 1940); and Antonio Canepa, Sistema di dottrina del fascismo 3 vols.
(Rome: Formiggini, 1937).
55
The term “ideology” is used here to mean “a systematically related set of philosophical,
normative and social science propositions that provide a general ’worldview’ which, when
employed to address some real or fancied problem, delivers doctrinal recommendations
concerning individual and collective behavior.” See Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism, pp.
3–6.
56
Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, pp. 452, 474, 508, 561.
57
Ibid., p. 420.
58
Ibid., p. 281.
59
Ibid., p. 334.
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Some things become reasonably clear in any review of Panunzio’s exegesis of Fascist philosophy. Among them is the fact that Panunzio’s emphasis on specifically individual self-realization as the end of history and
the purpose of the state— while there—is far less evident than it is in the
works of Gentile and Spirito. For Gentile, “the supreme law of the life of
the spirit” was self-realization—the moral imperative to be “the ideal self
that the individual ought to be.”60
In the official Dottrina del fascismo, in the philosophical portion written by Gentile, it is that conception of self-realization that provides for
the moral reaffirmation of the state and its role. The state is characterized
as the arena in which the individual becomes his truer, fuller self. Only
through an arduous and sacrificial “process of communion with family
and social groups, with the nation and with history”—under the aegis of
the state—might the individual achieve the promised self-realization.61
Panunzio’s discussion never achieved the philosophical sophistication
that typified that found in the epistemological and ethical works of Actualists. While it was evident that Panunzio’s ideas were essentially compatible with those of Actualists,62 he nowhere gave his convictions the technical philosophical specificity and rigor found in the works of Gentile. The
compatibility of his views with those of Gentile is evidenced by Panunzio’s
emphasis on the idealist roots of Fascism—through references to the
works of Giambattista Vico, G.W.F. Hegel, Giuseppe Mazzini, Antonio
Rosmini, and Vincenzo Gioberti with impressive regularity—authors
with whom Gentile identified his Actualism.63 He was subsequently to
argue that the Fascist corporative state fully satisfied the philosophical
and ethical requirements of the generic Hegelian state—requiring some
form of Hegelianism as its normative rationale.
60
Giovanni Gentile, Genesi e struttura della società (Verona: Mondadori, 1954), pp. 36,
37. This is found in the English edition, Genesis and Structure of Society (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1960), pp. 75, 76. These references are used because they are easily accessible. Gentile’s thoughts on “self-actualization,” and the relationship with political and social
life, are found in all his major works.
61
Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo (Milan: Hoepli, 1935), pt. 1, paras. 6, 7. The logic
of the Dottrina is transparent. Its ethical foundation is that the Fascist state provides the
circumstances in which the individual achieves moral fulfillment—and therefore has the
right to demand sacrifice, obedience and dedication.
62
The qualifications that attend this generalization will be dealt with in chapter 8 of
this text.
63
See, for example, Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, pp. 5, 21, 22–24 n. 1.
Gentile wrote his doctoral dissertation on Rosmini and Gioberti, and made Hegel, Vico,
and Mazzini critical to the development of Fascist thought. Gentile, Rosmini e Gioberti:
Saggio storico sulla filosofia Italiana del Risorgimento, 3rd, enlarged ed. (Florence: Sansoni,
1958) and Origini e dottrina del fascismo (Rome: Littorio, 1929); and Giambattista Vico
(Florence: Sansoni, 1936); La riforma della dialettica Hegeliana, 3rd ed. (Florence: Sansoni,
1954. Third edition).
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The fact is that without some form of Hegelianism, there could be no
coherent vindication for paradigmatic Fascism. The nationalism of Corradini and Rocco tended to argue that the individual would have to be
somehow subordinated to the political state in order that the nation might
survive. The Hegelian argument was that individuals could only fulfill
themselves by growing into their communities—principal among them
the nation and the state. Similarly, Panunzio insisted that Fascism never
conceived the relationship between the individual and the state as one
that could legitimately be characterized as “statolatry, or political absolutism,” but rather one in which the state oversaw “the richest possible development of both individual and social forces.”64
While never totally absent among Italian nationalists, the discussion
concerning the self-actualization of the individual was invariably clouded
by a focus on the individual’s service to the state. Thus, even when Rocco
spoke of Fascism’s effort to “resolve the fatal tensions between the necessities of political organization and those of the harmonious development
of the human personality”—it seemed that he applauded the effort only
because he saw an “insufficiency of personality development” as negatively affecting the prospects of the state.65
When nationalists spoke of the relationship between the individual and
the state, there was a tendency to emphasize sacrifice and obedience to
the exclusion of self-fulfillment. Thus, when Rocco spoke of Fascism’s
inversion of the relationship of the individual to society as that relationship was understood by political and economic liberalism, he could speak
of the “total sacrifice of the individual to society.”66 In what was clearly
a matter of emphasis, Actualists never spoke of the “total sacrifice” of the
individual to the state. They affirmed that sacrifice—even the supreme
sacrifice exacted in the defense of the nation—contributed to the individual’s achievement of “that spiritual existence in which” each who sacrificed
was to find true “value as a human being.”67 For Actualists, in fact, “the
state was the true reality of the individual,” and its defense was in his or
her ultimate interests.68
64
Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, p. 67 n. 1.
Alfredo Rocco, “Tornata parlamentare 9 marzo 1928,” Atti Parlamentari (Rome: Casa
editrice dello stato, 1928), p. 8511.
66
Alfredo Rocco, La formazione dello stato fascista (1925–1934) (Milan: Giuffre, 1938),
pp. 1101–2. Mussolini said that “We are among the first to have affirmed, against demoliberal individualism, that the individual does not exist, if not and in so far as he is in the state,
and subordinate to the necessities of the state.” Mussolini, “Al gran rapporto del fascismo,”
in Oo, vol. 24, p. 145.
67
In one place Panunzio frames this Gentilean notion in the following fashion: “in defending the state, [individuals] defend themselves, the very profundity of themselves.” Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato, p. 61.
68
Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo, Pt. 1, paras. 2, 7.
65
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For Actualists, the individual, in his or her most profound self, identified epistemologically and morally with the community and with the state.
Thus, the individual could never be “totally sacrificed” to the community
or the state without moral outrage. Whatever sacrifice was demanded
from the individual could only be justified if such sacrifice was understood
to be a voluntary act in the pursuit of moral perfection. The Gentilean
notion of “self-actualization” involved such sacrifices as part of the spiritual process only when such behaviors were understood to be part of a
course through which individuals might find their fulfillment.
Similarly, Panunzio always argued that the individual would gradually
come to understand just such conceptions by successive approximations—
in a process that was at once psychological, moral, and educative. Individuals would learn through education and experience as the Fascist state matured in its practice. The process would involve “the progressive socialization of the individual, through what is essentially moral education.”69
It is obvious from the entire catalog of Panunzio’s works that while his
philosophical orientation was compatible with the basic tenets of Actualism, his primary political concerns turned on the juridical character of
Fascist institutions and their doctrinal rationale. While relatively insubstantial in terms of epistemology, ethics, and technical philosophy, Panunzio’s meticulous juridical treatises distinguish his works from those of
other thinkers of the period.
After a perfunctory acknowledgment of the role of philosophy as preliminary to his task, Panunzio carefully followed the evolution of syndicalist and corporativist legislation from the first period of Fascist rule
throughout its tenure. In the course of Fascism’s evolution, Panunzio identified several phases—empirically observed and empirically confirmed.
The first period he identified as the “movement phase,” in which Fascism mobilized the forces and advanced its program—a period begun immediately after the termination of the First World War and continued
through the end of 1921—which saw the movement spread through the
Po Valley and invest the major cities of the north. The period from the
end of 1921 through October 1922, Panunzio characterizes as the “insurrection,” the military defeat of the liberal and parliamenary state. The
March on Rome on 28 October 1922 marked the commencement of the
“revolutionary dictatorship”—in what Panunzio called an “epiphany of
history.” The revolution was the bearer of a new conception of the state—
the resolution of a systemic political and economic crisis.70 That dictatorship originally featured the concessions implied in Fascism’s first commitment to the fabrication of a “Manchestrian state”—an effort to mobilize
69
70
Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, pp. 253, 256.
Panunzio, “Teoria generale della dittatura,” Gerarchia 14, no. 4 (April 1936), p. 235.
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non-Fascist allies in order to undertake rapid economic development and
the reestablishment of order on the peninsula as quickly as possible. That
period closed with Mussolini’s speech on 3 January 1925, when the call
was issued for “Fascism as a government and as a party” to assume full,
and uncompromising, power.71
Commencing in 1926, Fascism entered on a period of institutionalization
through which it was to exercise totalitarian control over the peninsula—
as a “Regime.”72 Panunzio identified the “revolutionary dictatorship,” the
preliminary to the totalitarian regime, as an entirely modern phenomenon.
It was the consequence of a response to singularly modern crises. The revolution and the dictatorship that followed were embodiments of a totalitarian commitment that understood itself to be infallibly enlightened. Panunzio held such a dictatorship to be an irrepressible product of history itself—
the consequence of crises that without revolutionary resolution would otherwise be destructive of culture and human potential.73
Panunzio argued that the revolutionary party, the revolutionary dictatorship, and its subsequent revolutionary regime were incomparably modern phenomena. They were unique in history. He went on to catalog a
series of just such revolutionary parties and their associated dictatorships.
Among them, he identified the Bolshevik party of the Soviet Union, the
National Socialist party of post-Weimar Germany, the Kuomintang of
post-dynastic China, and the Falange of post-Republican Spain.74 He held
that all these revolutionary parties were distinguished by traits that identified them as members of the same classificatory genus: the totalitarian
revolutionary party. Because animated by an invincible conviction in the
truth of their ideology, such parties, once successful, carry the exclusivist,
unitary party, and subsequent party-state in their train.75
Panunzio dealt with what he considered the formal, organizational, or
institutional similarities of such parties—characteristics that were the
product of their organizational features rather than their specific ideological beliefs. For example, he maintained that the conviction in their own
infallibility bred in each a typically ecclesiastical character. Their unrelieved conviction in the truth of their respective belief systems generated
71
Mussolini, “Discorso del 3 Gennaio,” in Oo, vol. 21, p. 240.
Panunzio briefly summarizes this trajectory in Teoria generale dello stato fascista, pp.
430–31.
73
Panunzio, “Teoria generale della dittatura,” pp. 305–10.
74
Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, pp. 459–63, 513–14, 523, 557, 564,
579; and Panunzio, Spagna nazionalsindacalista (Milan: Bietti, 1942), pp. 46–51, 79, 89–
90, 103–11.
75
Panunzio had some reservations about the “purity” of the form of totalitarianism to be
found in the Spanish Falange and the Chinese Kuomintang. See A. James Gregor, Phoenix:
Fascism in our Time (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001), pp. 131–37.
72
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responses that were typically religious—ritualistic, liturgical, jealous, and
exclusionary.76 Members of such parties proved to be intransigent in their
convictions, intolerant of alternative ideologies, and punitive toward outgroup members. Panunzio went on to argue that those dispositions generated the need for an aggressive defense against nonbelievers in the form
of military ancillaries to the party—the “action squads” and the voluntary
militia of revolutionary Fascism, the Bolshevik Red Guards, the Sturmabteilungen, and the subsequent Shutzstaffel, of the National Socialists.77
By entailment, such dispositions found expression in ready recourse to
violence to protect the integrity of their doctrinal convictions.78
Given the character of their commitments, and the circumstances in
which they are forced to operate, such parties take upon themselves pedagogical responsibilities—as evangels of the truths they were prepared to
defend with arms.79 Together with such traits, the revolutionary parties
and the regimes they precede are fundamentally political in essence.80
However they commence, perhaps with an ideology that is economic and
materialist in inspiration, modern revolutions and the regimes they create
emphasize the supremacy of politics and the subordination of all else.
While perfectly content with his account of their formal similarities,
Panunzio went on to outline their substantive ideological differences. Almost all were found to be critically wanting in coherence and normative
effect.
With respect to the Soviet Union, Panunzio was dismissive of the Marxist-Leninist claim that they possessed an ideology that could be considered,
in any sense, impeccable. He maintained that belief to be either simple
pretense, delusionary, or the result of theoretical confusion. Marxism, Panunzio contended, had committed itself to ontological and epistemological
materialism. No matter how “dialectical” that materialism, Panunzio held
it to be beset by fundamental difficulties. Among those difficulties was an
inability to discuss its conceptions without massive confusion. The concept
“class,” for example, which was presumably at the center of the system,81
was nowhere defined with any precision—a singular failure for a system
that claimed to be an infallible social science.82
76
Panunzio spoke of totalitarian beliefs as religious in character. With respect to such
beliefs, “one cannot be neutral.” See Panunzio, Il sentimento dello stato, pp. 20–21.
77
See Panunzio’s comments, ibid., p. 462.
78
Panunzio spoke of the revolutionary dictatorship as employing “the violence of the
idea in the service of the idea.” Panunzio, “Teoria generale della dittatura,” p. 306.
79
Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, pp. 5, 19, 59–60, 64, 109, 253, 261,
275, 278, 456, 462, 471, 483, 501–3.
80
Ibid., pp. 557–63.
81
Ibid., pp. 25–26.
82
Ibid., p. 246.
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In terms of the reality within which the Bolsheviks found themselves
compelled to operate, the failure of the international revolution left the
Russian revolutionaries not in possession of a worldwide industrial system
capable of generating the liberal abundance anticipated by Marx and Engels, but in possession of an economically retrograde nation. Other than
rule a fractious and grievously wounded system, the Bolsheviks were driven
to mobilize and organize workers in order to restart, maintain, and foster
the national economy. To speak of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in
such an environment was an absurdity. A nation so circumstanced could
hardly be composed of a single class, much less be ruled by one.
A nation is a system, made up of functionally related categories of persons; and so it was in the Soviet Union.83 Every class was represented in
the Stalinist totalitarian system—and the system was a dictatorship not
of, but over the proletariat (however “proletariat” was, in fact, defined).
The inconsistent system generated a new bureaucratic “class” (actually a
stratum or a category) that acceded to dominance, with Josef Stalin, as
the Vohzd, the Leader, becoming the capstone of the system.84
Panunzio argued that the rationale of the Soviet totalitarian state was
based on a collection of fictions having very little to do with classical
Marxism—the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Classical
Marxism was fundamentally anarchic with respect to the state.85 All the
revolutionaries active in Italy before the First World War understood that
perfectly well. All, almost without exception, including Mussolini and
Panunzio, himself, were initially intrinsically and unalterably opposed to
the state.
That had been true in Russia as well. It was as true of Lenin as it was
for any other. His State and Revolution, written immediately before the
Russian revolution, was basically antistate, antimilitary, and antipolice—
anticipating the “withering away” of the state, and all its agencies, immediately on the successful accession to power by the Bolsheviks. In light of
that, Stalin could only describe the subsequent creation of the Soviet
state—“the mightiest and strongest state power that has ever existed”—
as one of the “contradictions” of “dialectical development” intending, as
Communism did, to accomplish the very “withering away” of the state.86
Panunzio cited these kinds of confusions as contributing to the inability
of the Communist party to rule without the massacre of millions of inno83
See Panunzio’s comments in Il sentimento dello stato, pp. 139–40.
See Panunzio’s comments, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, p. 558.
85
Ibid., pp. 565–67; and Il sentimento dello stato, pp. 42–47, n. 18.
86
J. Stalin, “”Political Report of the Central Committee to the Sixteenth Congress,“
Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1952), vol. 12, p. 381. See Panunzio’s comments, Il
sentimento dello stato, pp. 235–36.
84
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cents.87 If the revolution was destined to produce revolutionary dictatorship, and a regime that enjoyed unqualified sovereignty over its citizens,
any ideology that was inconsistent and unpersuasive would most likely
have to sustain its authority with naked violence.88
Thus it is interesting to note that Panunzio held Hitler’s National Socialism to be apparently as mistaken in its ideological commitments as
Stalin’s Marxism-Leninism. Thus, as late as 1936, when Fascist Italy and
National Socialist Germany were gradually approaching each other in
political and military alliance, Panunzio noted that the rationale of “the
Hitlerian revolution brings nothing with it other than the notion of ‘race,’
which literally has nothing to do with the concept ‘nation.’ ”—a concept
critical to modern revolution.89
As cautious as Panunzio was, he repeated the same reservations concerning National Socialist ideology in 1939, even after the publication of
the official “Fascist Doctrine of Race,” and the international pacts that
united Fascist Italy with National Socialist Germany.90
In retrospect, the implications are eminently clear. National Socialism
was animated by a seriously flawed ideology, intrinsically incapable of
convincing anyone not already committed by self-interest, sentiment, or
simple emotion.91 If that were the case, the analysis of Bolshevik failures
offered by Panunzio carried omninous entailments for those who lived
under the revolutionary dictatorship of National Socialist Germany.
For Panunzio, Fascism was paradigmatic of revolutions in the twentieth
century. Any substantial departure from its ideological, doctrinal, or institutional properties could only threaten its revolutionary performance.
The central issue that immediately arises in such an account turns on the
ability to identify the fundamental “principles” of the revolutionary and
87
Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, p. 565.
These implications surface throughout Panunzio’s exposition—hence his emphasis on
the credibility of Fascism’s justificatory rationale. Thus Panunzio insisted, shortly before
his death, that the entire structure of Fascism rested on “the Fascist conscience”—on the
“collection of persuasive convictions and beliefs that live in each of us”—in much the same
manner as the Gentilean Actualists. He held that the “first principles” were immediate and
self-affirming data of consciousness. See Panunzio, Motivi e metodo della codificazione fascista (Milan: Giuffre, 1943), pp. 168–69.
89
Panunzio, “Teoria generale della dittatura,” p. 309.
90
Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, p. 32.
91
Thus, in 1937, Julius Evola, a marginal thinker in Fascist Italy, published his Il mito
del sangue that was presumably read and approved by Mussolini himself. Evola wrote that
“the theory of race,” which inspired National Socialist Germany, was not a “concept” that
could be evaluated employing “properly scientific, philosophic, or historical” criteria. Evola
identified National Socialist race theory as a “myth”—not a fiction, but a nonrational device, which through “suggestive force” would be capable of moving persons to action. He
reminded his audience that Mussolini had always insisted that race was a “matter of sentiment, not a reality.” Julius Evola, Il mito del sangue (Milan: Hoepli, 1937), pp. ix, x.
88
T H E M AT U R I N G O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
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totalitarian regime. The issue, which is fundamentally philosophical, engaged Panunzio. In his response, Panunzio appealed to “Fascist conscience, that collection of persuasions and beliefs that live in each of us
. . . [as] immediate data of consciousness.” He addressed himself to the
epistemic nature of just those “first principles”: they could not be derived,
because they were logically primary. He concluded that they must be matters of “belief, faith . . . and persuasion.”92
It is at that point that an appeal to Actualism recommended itself. Panunzio had himself recognized that philosophy provided the necessary
intellectual foundation for Fascism both as an ideology and as a revolutionary doctrine of the state. Such an argument could only conclude in
some variant of the first principles of ontological and epistemological
Actualism.
In general, it can be argued that the major claims found in the work of
Panunzio were all but fully compatible with Gentilean Actualism. Only
if one were to carefully pursue Panunzio’s arguments would the suggestion of differences make themself apparent.
For one thing, Panunzio had made evident his objection to the “absolute immanence” that was central to Gentile’s epistemology and ontology.
Gentile proposed an epistemology that was “presuppositionless”—a theory of knowledge that commenced with the self-affirming awareness of
consciousness—that drew “reality,” and all its myriad distinctions, out of
the immediacy of its own experience.93 Gentile argued that an ultimate
unity was a cardinal necessity for the intelligibility and the moral meaningfulness of the world as it emerged from immediate experience. Experience, in the final analysis, could not be divided, intelligently or morally,
into separate and distinct “subjects” and “objects”—each forever separated and distinct. In some sense, subjects and objects, whatever the commonsense distinctions that marked them out in the empirical world, were
one. They both arose out of a transcendental, sensing, and thinking subject. Objects were immanent in that “universal thinking subject”—distinctions having been made, and defended, in thought.94
Whatever this meant for common sense, it had major significance
for organized religion. For Gentile, religion as a system of belief, and
92
Panunzio, Motivi e metodo della codificazione fascista, pp. 168–69. This is a repeat of
the account in “I principi generali del diritto fascista (Contributo alla loro determinazione),” in Principi generali dell’ordinamento giuridico fascista (Pisa: University di Pisa,
1940), reprinted in Perfetti (ed.), Panunzio, Il fondamento giuridico del fascismo, p. 322.
93
A convenient English treatment of the epistemological issues of Actualism can be found
in Pasquale Romanelli, The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile: An Inquiry into Gentile’s Conception of Experience (New York: Birnbaum, 1937).
94
See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philospher of Fascism (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001), chap. 3.
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God, as the object of those beliefs, were understood to be immanent in,
and not external to, humanity. Actualism was a radical form of humanism—the kind of philosophical humanism that had been the acknowledged opponent of organized Roman Catholicism for at least half a thousand years.
By the early 1920s, the Church had identified Actualism as a solipsistic
or pantheistic heresy—and when Mussolini decided to have Gentile write
the “Idee fondamentali” of the official Dottrina del fascismo, the Church
broadcast its objections to “the diabolic philosophy of the ethical state.”95
A substantial number of important Fascists—who were Roman Catholics—found themselves entertaining grave reservations concerning the official character of Actualism.96 They correctly anticipated the objections
of the Vatican—and, in fact, by the mid-1930s, the Catholic Church had
placed all of Gentile’s works on its Index of proscribed literature. That
together with the much heralded Concordat with the papacy made the
issue of Actualism’s political and intellectual role in the defense of Fascism
increasing sensitive.
Panunzio’s position in all of this was eminently clear. In the first place,
he emphasized the importance of the Concordat from the point of view
of the moral integrity of Fascism. More than that, he maintained that
Fascism was “intrinsically Roman Catholic.”97
The difficulty, of course, was that it really was impossible to affirm
with any conviction that Mussolini himself had taken an unequivocal
position on the issue. Initially, Mussolini was indifferent to the Roman
Catholic objections to Actualism. In fact, the position he originally assumed was immediately objectionable to the Church. In explaining the
implications of the Lateran Accords to his followers, Mussolini maintained that while “the Fascist state . . . is Roman Catholic,” according
to his agreements with the Vatican, it was “in fact and above all, exclusively and essentially Fascist.”98
Thus, in 1932, against the explicit objections of the Vatican, Mussolini
assigned Gentile the task of articulating the fundamental philosophical
principles of Fascism. To this day, the official Dottrina del fascismo has
Gentile’s “fundamental ideas” as its necessary preamble; it constitutes the
official foundation of Fascist thought.
95
See H. S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana: University of
Illinois, 1960), p. 205.
96
See Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, pp. 63–65, 69–80.
97
Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, pp. 281–82, n. 1.
98
Mussolini, “Relazione alla Camera dei deputati sugli accordi del Laterano,” in Oo,
vol. 24, p. 89.
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161
For all that, by the mid-1930s, the issue of Roman Catholic objections
to Actualism created controversy everywhere in Fascist Italy. For Panunzio, it created significant intellectual, political, and moral problems.
In the 1920s, he had made his neo-Hegelianism transparent. As has
been indicated, his basic agreement with the substance of Actualism as a
system of thought can be demonstrated. The one objection that he made
explicit was the issue of “transcendence.” Actualism insisted on thought,
spirit, consciousness as the reality of the world. It reserved no place for a
thought, spirit, or consciousness that “transcended” that of human beings. The world must be immanent in the only thought we, as human
beings, knew. In such a construal of the world there could be no place for
the traditional deity, standing outside human thought. It was that radical
humanism that made Actualism anathema to the Roman Church.
It was clear that Panunzio could not accept such an interpretation of
the world. As a consequence, Panunzio was reluctant to cite Actualism,
even when direct allusion to Actualism would have intellectually strengthened his argument. Although his publications are dotted with references
to the works of Gentile, Panunzio never really specifically mobilized Actualism to the argument. As has been suggested, references to the works
of Vico, Rosmini, Spaventa, Mazzini, and Gioberti appear throughout
Panunzio’s texts—all thinkers who provided the intellectual background
for Actualism—but there are few direct citations to Gentile’s publications
themselves. The cost that Panunzio was to pay included an inability to
carry his argument to a persuasive conclusion.
As has been suggested, Panunzio acknowledged that his arguments required ultimate recourse to “first principles.”99 In his Teoria generale dello
stato fascista, he maintained that those principles were to found in the
“philosophical premises of idealism.” He immediately added, however,
that the neo-Hegelianism that would supply those premises would be an
idealism that allowed for a “transcendent” God.100 Panunzio had allowed
himself to be put in a position from which he might have to argue that
the first principles of Fascism came from the God of Roman Catholicism.
As we have seen, when he was asked, shortly before his death, to supply
the “first principles” of Fascist thought, Panunzio made recourse, without
argument, to the “immediate data and the immediate intuitions of consciousness, to the data of faith . . . and persuasion.”101 This was a minimalist account of the “presuppositionless” epistemology and moral phi99
Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, pp. x, xiii.
Ibid., pp. 5, 22–24, n. 1.
101
Panunzio, “I principi generali del diritto fascista,” Principi generale dell’ordinamento
giuridico fascista, in Il fondamento giuidico del fascismo, p. 322.
100
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losophy of Actualism. Panunzio might have put together another account,
drawing on Hegel or Spaventa. He did not. It was left to his readers.
The fact is that, for whatever reason, the relationship between Panunzio
and Gentile had always been acrimonious. Gentile never cited any of Panunzio’s works and apparently never allowed his name to be cited in any
of the volumes of the Enciclopedia italiana. All of that has no real relevance in taking the measure of the intellectual defense of Fascism or in
judging the competence of its apologists.
By the mid-1930s, the ideology of Fascism was essentially complete.
The Actualist rationale was conjoined with that typical of Panunzio’s account of the institutional properties of Fascism. Panunzio spoke of philosophical idealism as the normative foundation of the state,102 and then
proceded to argue how a neo-Hegelian vindication provided the moral
grounds for the Fascist party’s control of the political infrastructure of
the nation. On the basis of those neo-Hegelian concepts, the local, provincial and national party organizations provided the critical membership of
all the highest legislative, executive, and economic organs of the state.103
By the end of the 1920s, the Gran consiglio (Grand Council of Fascism),
composed of the senior leaders of the Partito nazionale fascista, was recognized in law as the highest political organ of the state, in effect controlling the entire nation. The officiating officer of the Grand Council was
Mussolini.
Parallel to the specifically political structure of the state, the several syndicalist and corporativist bodies were united in “category” councils, in
which representatives of the agricultural, industrial, and service sectors
were vertically congregated in a Consiglio nazionale delle corporazioni
(National Council of Corporations), to provide their expertise and counsel
in fashioning the nation’s economic goals. This was the analogue of the
“technical committees of competence” spoken of by Panunzio at the very
founding of the Fascist movement—only one aspect of the many prefigured
in his initial conceptions of national syndicalism as early as 1921.104
Since the meetings of the Assembly of the National Council of Corporations, given the large membership involved, were cumbersome, a Central
Corporative Committee—composed of ministers and their more important subsecretaries, the secretary and vice-secretaries of the Fascist
party, the chief officers of the Dopolavoro (the organization devoted to
general labor interests and recreation), and the vice presidents of the category corporations—became the most active agency of the entire system.
102
Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, pp. 5–6.
As early as 1929, Panunzio outlined the central dominance of the state. See Panunzio,
Il sentimento dello stato, pp. 101–2, 107–9.
104
Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, p. 242.
103
T H E M AT U R I N G O F FA S C I S T D O C T R I N E
163
Mussolini retained the power to determine its composition.105 Together
with his control of the “omnicompetent and sovereign state,”106 and the
party, Mussolini controlled what Panunzio correctly described as a neoHegelian “monistic state.”107
The syndicalist and corporativist institutions, while directive in terms
of the economic interests of the nation, were clearly understood to be
fundamentally political. The institutions were understood to be “political-ethical” in intrinsic character. Their intent, beyond their function as
state agencies of economic counsel and control, was the political “socialization” of the population in order to effect their moral identification with
the “omnicomprehensive unity of the state.”108
By the mid-1930s, convinced that the international liberal economic
system had lapsed into a fatal torpor, the Fascist regime was preparing
the entire corporative structure to serve as “an instrument under the aegis
of the state,” to carry out “the complete organic and totalitarian regulation of production with a view to the expansion of the wealth, political
power and well-being of the Italian people.”109 Ultimately, those evolving
economic institutions would substitute for the “anachronistic” traditional Camera of the parliament.110
By that time, Fascism had essentially concluded its institutionalization,
together with the articulation of the philosophical rationale that would
serve as its vindication. It had overcome some of the major economic
disabilities suffered in the course of the Great Depression, to recommence
its disciplined growth and expanding industrialization. Heard, more and
more frequently, were those foreign policy themes that had accompanied
Fascism at its birth.111 There was increasing talk of territorial expansion
to meet the nation’s resource and settlement needs—and there was talk
of strategic initiatives calculated to allow the nation free access to the
oceans of the world.112 Fascism was preparing to embark on its final,
fateful course.
105
Panunzio spoke of Mussolini as the “logical center” of the entire system. Ibid., pp.
336, and 295–96, 312, 335–36, 339, 349, 366.
106
Ibid., pp. 40–43.
107
Ibid., pp. 299–300.
108
Ibid., pp. 125–26, 134, 154, 175.
109
Mussolini, “Dichiarazione per le costituende corporazioni,” in Oo, vol. 26, p. 85.
110
Mussolini, “Discorso per lo stato corporativo,” in Oo, vol. 26, p. 94.
111
See the discussion in Giorgio Rumi, Alle origini della politica esterna fascista, 1918–
1923 (Bari: Laterza, 1968).
112
See Robert Mallet, The Italian Navy and Fascist Expansionism, 1935–1940 (London:
Frank Cass, 1998); C. Terracciano, G. Roletto, and E. Masi, Geopolitica fascista: Antologia
di scritti (Milan: Barbarossa, 1993), particularly Carlo Tetracciano, “Direttrici geopolitiche
coloniali dell’Italia nell’era fascista,” pp. 5–20.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
In the course of those final turbulent and tragic years, Fascism’s increasingly intimate relationship with Hitler’s Germany —together with
the tensions generated by a conflict that clearly exceeded its powers—
influenced the regime to assume doctrinal theses fundamentally alien to
its ideological integrity. At the same time, it will be argued, the central
developments of the system remained consistent and its political and economic efforts coherent.
What is clear is the fact that the ideology of Fascism had achieved maturity by the end of the 1930s. The final years of the regime were consumed
in the catastrophe that was the Second World War. It was in those years
that the intellectuals who had collected around Fascism were to deliver
themselves of their final judgments.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Camillo Pellizzi, Carlo Costamagna,
and the Final Issues
IN JANUARY 1934, Giovanni Gentile wrote, “A period has closed and another opens. Every Italian senses that . . . the Fascist revolution has attained maturity . . . [The] period of transition between the old liberal,
and the new Fascist, civilization is now over.”1 As a consequence of that
conviction, Gentile changed the title of the journal of the Institute over
which he presided from Educazione fascista, to Civiltà fascista—from reference to a tentative “Fascist education” to invocation of a presumably
fully emergent “Fascist civilization.”
Years later, Camillo Pellizzi, the last effective president of the institute
Gentile founded, suggested a very similar assessment of the period traversed. After 1932 and 1933, Pellizzi maintained, there was little in Fascist Italy that could pass as specifically corporative doctrinal development. Most debate turned on the institutionalization of decisions already
made. Fascism had entered into a phase dominated by foreign policy concerns—ranging from responses to the global economic crisis now identified as the Great Depression, to war in Ethiopia and Spain—to a growing
rapprochement with Adolf Hitler’s Germany.2
Domestically, the ideology of Fascism had attained those qualities that
heralded its maturity. Fascism’s primary interest, after 1934, was the pursuit of its foreign policy objectives—objectives that had been largely fixed,
in a generic sense, before the March on Rome.3
In 1937, the institute founded by Gentile changed its title from the
“National Fascist Institute of Culture” to the Istituto nazionale di cultura fascista, the “National Institute of Fascist Culture.” The original
title announced the Fascist intention of dealing with the prevailing culture. The new title conveyed the assurance that a distinctive and fully
1
Gentile, “Parole preliminari,” Civiltà fascista 1, no. 1 (January 1934), pp. 1–3.
See his comments in Camillo Pellizzi, La tecnica come classe dirigente (Rome: Frattina,
n.d.), pp. 17–18. The comments were probably made in 1949.
3
See the discussion in Carlo Terracciano, “Direttrici geopolitiche coloniali dell’Italia nell’era fascista,” in C. Terracciano, G. Boletto, and E. Masi, Geopolitica fascista: Antologia
di scritti (Milan: Barbarossa, 1993), pp. 5–20.
2
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CHAPTER EIGHT
articulated Fascist culture had been contrived and was to be disseminated and fostered.4
It was at that juncture that Achille Starace, then national secretary of
the Partito nazionale fascista, sought to bring Gentile’s institute under
direct political control of the party as part of a systematic program of
“fascistizing” the nation. The effort provoked Gentile’s resistance. Gentile’s concept of education was vastly different, in principle and spirit,
from that of Starace. In the institutional struggle that followed, Gentile
tendered his resignation. On 7 March 1937, he surrendered the leadership
of the institute he had founded in 1925.
Between 1937 and April 1940, the National Institute of Fascist Culture was essentially presided over by place-holders. At that point, immediately prior to Italy’s intervention in the Second World War, Camillo
Pellizzi assumed the presidency. He had been specifically selected by
Mussolini himself.5
Born in Collegno, Turin, on 24 August 1896, Pellizzi was an accomplished intellectual. After active service in the First World War, he pursued his academic interests in England, where he lived for long periods
of time between 1920 and 1939, remaining forever occupied with Italian
affairs and the Fascism with which he had early identified. He became a
recognized journalist, a literary critic, and a university professor who
served in both English and Italian institutions of advanced learning.
Throughout his foreign residency, he continued to regularly contribute
to Italian newspapers and journals. Two of his earliest works, Problemi e
realtà del fascismo and Fascismo-aristocrazia,6 both Fascist apologetics,
marked the parameters of his political thought—from which he was not
ever to really deviate.
In his twenties, Pellizzi saw in the squadristi—the Fascist foot soldiers
of the revolution—the promise of a new political “aristocracy” that
would secure both the nation’s unity and its independence from foreigners. It would rescue Italy from its long degradation and restore it to the
first rank among modern nations. He argued that for too long Italy had
remained a servile inferior to those industrialized nations that turned to
4
For decades after the passing of the regime, some intellectuals chose to discuss whether
there had ever been a “Fascist culture.” If one understands a culture as being defined in
terms of a coherent collection of reasonably specific normative, philosophical, political, and
economic principles that inform a system, then there was a Fascist culture.
5
See the excellent discussion of this period in Gisella Longo, L’Istituto nazionale fascista
di cultura: Gli intellettuali tra partito e regime (Rome: Antonio Pellicani, 2000) and Danilo
Breschi and Gisella Longo, Camillo Pellizzi: La ricera delle elites tra political e sociologica
(1896–1979) (Soveria mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003).
6
Pellizzi, Problemi e realtà del fascismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1922); and Fascismo-aristocrazia (Milan: Alpes, 1925).
THE FINAL ISSUES
167
her only as a market supplement where they might profitably dispose of
their excess products.7
In effect, immediately after the First World War, the young Pellizzi was
animated by that same tissue of convictions that succeeded in making
Fascists of so many Italians. He, like them, rejected parliamentary institutions, international organizations, utopian notions of universal harmony,
socialist nostrums, class warfare, political passivity, and moral indifference. By the time he became politically active, he was a convinced “Mussoliniano”—a dedicated admirer of the man with whom he associated the
revolutionary promise of a new, and more imposing, Italy.
More to our purpose, Pellizzi was an Actualist of sorts—a principled
follower of Gentile. For Pellizzi, Gentile was “the first philosopher of
Fascism.” In his judgment, it was “in no way accidental” that Gentilean
idealism shared “resonance in, and a moral affinity with, the actions of
Fascism.”8
Throughout his service as a Fascist intellectual, Pellizzi remained, in
critical measure, an Actualist. In fact, those with whom he most intensively interacted were almost all Actualists. He shared the intellectual persuasions of Ugo Spirito and Arnaldo Volpicelli, themselves Actualists.9
Pellizzi distinguished himself from rigorous Actualism insofar as he was
a practicing Roman Catholic.
The relationship of Actualism and institutional Roman Catholicism, as
has been indicated, remained a troubling question throughout the history
of the Fascist regime. Even though Gentile’s proposed reform of Italy’s educational system in 1923 reintroduced Catholic religious teaching in the public elementary and secondary schools from which they had earlier been excluded by liberal sensibilities, the Catholic Church continued to object to
his Actualism. Gentile’s conviction that religion was an intrinsic and valuable part of the nation’s history was not considered sufficient. The Church’s
objections turned on the immanentism of philosophical Actualism—in
which all reality, all ideas, all knowledge, all perceptions, all beliefs, and all
sentiments found their ultimate source in consciousness—and left no room
for the transcendent, personal deity of orthodox Roman Catholicism.10
The modal response of active Fascists, in the concerted effort to avoid
overt conflict with the Church, was a readiness to sacrifice Actualist philosophical rigor for “collaboration” with established Catholicism—in the
somewhat forlorn hope that the totalitarian “interests of the state [might]
7
Pellizzi, Fascismo-aristocrazia, pp. 76–77, 80–81, 109, 147, 156, 194.
See ibid., pp. 25, 30, 40–41, 49.
9
See, for example, Longo, L’Istituto nazionale fascista di cultura, pp. 181–82.
10
William A. Smith, Giovanni Gentile on the Existence of God (Paris: Beatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1970).
8
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CHAPTER EIGHT
coincide with those of the Church.”11 Most argued that the issue was
not so unequivocal as to render conflict unavoidable. Moderation, it was
argued, recommended itself in dealing with the question.12 A moderate
Actualism, as a form of “spiritualism,” might serve Fascism as a “bridge”
to Catholicism. For Pellizzi such a strategy was perfectly acceptable. For
him, Gentilean dialectics allowed sufficient latitude to permit the insinuation of some form of Catholicism into that Actualism that was so central
to the rationale of Fascism.13
For an intransigent Fascist minority, on the other hand, Actualism was
either a form of humanistic atheism or an heretical pantheism—neither of
which could be tolerated by serious Roman Catholics. In their judgment,
Actualism was nothing less than a major political disability for Fascism.
That was the position assumed by at least several prominent Fascist theoreticians: including Roberto Farinacci, Paolo Orano and Carlo Costamagna.
For Orano, one of the more interesting of the early syndicalists-cumFascists, “in the truths of Catholicism . . . all the fatuous subtleties of
Actualist immanentism . . . [together with all its] sophisms are annihilated.”14 The position of Farinacci, and Costamagna in turn, were hardly
any less dismissive.15
Pellizzi himself was numbered among the more moderate Actualists. In
his exchanges with dissident Fascist youth, who insisted on both their antiidealist “realism” and their atheism, in order to distinguish themselves
from institutional idealism as well as Roman Catholic conformity, he
counseled that they had only begun to consider the philosophical issues.
He maintained that they were hardly equipped to make decisions concerning such difficult and significant matters. That they were not Catholics prompted Pellizzi to candidly confess that he sometimes preferred
their innocent atheism to official Catholicism.16 In effect, Pellizzi’s Actualism and his Catholicism were both sufficiently flexible to accommodate
each other.
As proved to be the case, just such properties recommended him to
Mussolini for the post vacated by Gentile in 1937. In 1940, Mussolini
had neither time nor patience to deal with the issues that turned on Actu11
Roberto Pavese, “Filosofia e religione di fronte al fascismo,” Gerarchia 14, no. 8 (August 1934), p. 670.
12
See the discussion in Delio Cantimori, “Chiarificazione di idee,” Vita nuova 8, no. 7
(July 1932), pp. 623–26.
13
Longo, L’Istituto nazionale fascista di cultura, p. 191 n. 29. Gentile saw no difficulty
as an immanentist remaining a Catholic.
14
Paolo Orano, Il fascismo (Rome: Pinciana, 1940), vol. 2, p. 281.
15
Carlo Costamagna, Dottrina del fascismo (Turin: UTET, 1940), pp. 9, 31, 33, 275–89.
16
Pellizzi, “Sul manifesto realista,” in Diano Brocchi, ed., L’Universale (Rome: Del Borghese, 1969), pp. 44–46.
THE FINAL ISSUES
169
alism’s philosophical humanism and its apparent Catholic heterodoxy.
Throughout his active life, Gentile had remained intransigently opposed
to institutional Catholicism as an infringement on the inviolable, totalitarian sovereignty of the state.17 Whether or not he considered himself, in
whatever sense, a Roman Catholic was irrelevant to what was a critical
and complicated political issue.18
Pellizzi had skirted just those issues for fifteen years—and in that sense,
could effectively represent the culture of Fascism as it had matured.
While Fascism always found itself uncomfortable with respect to official
Church doctrine, members of its hierarchy, more often than not, made
efforts to avoid direct confrontation. In that sense, Pellizzi was admirably
equipped, by disposition, to function in the intellectual environment of
the early 1940s.
By the time Pellizzi assumed the responsibility of the presidency of the
Istituto nazionale di cultura fascista in April 1940, he was singularly well
suited to further represent the regime with respect to other matters—corporativism and imperialism principal among them. In the few remaining
years left to Fascism, both issues were to be addressed.
While in 1933, Pellizzi had referred to corporativism as a system in
the process of articulation,19 by 1938, he was prepared to enter into the
animated discussion that surrounded what was considered, at that juncture, a “pause” in its slow, but ongoing, evolution. By that time, he was
prepared to maintain that the system was not involved in temporary inactivity. It was not showing signs of change because, for all intents and
purposes, it had achieved effective maturity.20
Fascist journals of the period were filled with exchanges concerning
developments in corporativist institutions. Some of the most searching
discussions turned on the purported functions of corporativist agencies.
Out of all the excitement, it became evident that the more sophisticated
of the discussants recognized that whatever had been proposed in the
heady years of the 1920s, the characteristic functions of corporative organs were, and had always been, consultative—essentially intended to
convey a sense of efficacy, of participation, to all the elements active in the
17
Gentile, Fascismo e cultura (Milan: Treves, 1928), p. 175.
See Gentile, La mia religione (Florence: Sansoni, 1943); see Ugo Spirito, “La religione
di Giovanni Gentile,” in Ugo Spirito, Giovanni Gentile (Florence: Sansoni, 1969), pp.
97–123.
19
See Pellizzi, “Ancora sulle ’formule,’ ” Critica fascista 11, no. 8 (15 April 1933), pp.
154–55.
20
See the opposing comments by Agostino Nasti, “Corporativismo concreto,” Critica
fascista 14, no. 6 (15 January 1936), pp. 81–82, in which he suggests that there has been
too much discussion concerning corporativism and too little concrete activity. This was
typical of the disputes that surrounded Fascist corporativism in general.
18
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nation’s economy. Whatever legislative or executive functions had been
suggested, over time, as the proper concern of syndicalist and corporativist agencies, were never really in the offing. Pellizzi held that the system
was, in effect, what it was intended to be. It was consultative.
Pellizzi reminded the discussants that the initiatives that had first
shaped Fascist syndicalism and then the corporativist system, in its entirety, had come almost exclusively from the state. It had been the state,
in fact and over time—irrespective of the intensity of the discussions conducted by corporativist theorists—that had discharged all the critical,
concrete economic social, and political functions that the new corporativist institutions were purportedly, and ultimately, to perform.
Commencing with the rescue of industries threatened by economic collapse after the First World War through the efforts to remedy the effects
of the international depression, it was the state alone that had assumed
complete responsibility and had itself intervened. In the decades that followed the March on Rome, corporativism had gradually become, and
remained, what was essentially a control system dominated by the political leadership of the Fascist state.
After the Ethiopian war and the internationally imposed punitive sanctions, the drive for national autarky had further activated the state—and
it was the state, not any of its constituent agencies, that governed the
domestic economic enterprise. Corporativist agencies had been the
“transmission belts” of state decisions. This had become evident over the
years. Very few serious analysts had been confused. Fascists themselves
regularly described the system in something like the following fashion:
“The state . . . proceeded to absorb the economic life of the nation. Central organs, possessed of irresistable political power, dominate productive
activity. . . . Not a single sector of the national economy has been able to
resist the state. . . . The result has everywhere been the same, the national
economy has been put in service to the state . . . so that the institutional
results remind one of state socialism.”21
In contributing to the discussion, Pellizzi made little effort to qualify
such an assessment. Instead, he expanded on the role of “authority” in
the process of corporative development. He reminded his audience that
in Fascist Italy, authority specifically emanated from the nation’s leaders.
His audience was reminded that Mussolini had initiated the processes out
of which corporativism had emerged. Corporativism had grown “out of
the rich soil of idealism”—and all of it had its ultimate vindication in the
totalitarianism of that idealism.
21
“Erba,” “Corporativismo e autarchia,” Critica fascista 16, no. 9 (1 March 1938), pp.
132–34.
THE FINAL ISSUES
171
Corporativism, for Pellizzi, was essentially a means of bringing the
working and productive classes into the circumference of the totalitarian
state—to infuse them with a consuming sense of participation in the fateful drama of national life. In such a system, neither individuals nor unattached groups of individuals, were expected to undertake independent
initiatives in political and economic circumstances characterized by one,
all-inclusive, executive will.
That will was the will of the Duce. Prior to the Second World War, what
all that meant to Western political liberals was that the Fascist system
was, at best, “authoritarian,” but more likely, “dictatorial.” And yet, as
has been suggested, one of the central arguments of Fascism’s rationale
was that the system was a “centralized, organized, and unitary democracy.”22 For Panunzio, the corporativist arrangements he had done so
much to foster and shape had helped create “a new, organic and harmonious democracy” out of what had been the ineffectual forms imposed on
Italy and the world by the “false, capitalistic and plutocratic so-called
democracies” of the Anglo-Saxon world.23
Fascist intellectuals did not deny that the state was the executive will
of an integrated, self-conscious, and active population conscious of its
goals and the conditions requisite to their achievement. They spoke of the
system as “hierarchical,” and Gentile recognized it as an expression of
the unitary, collectivist, higher self that was gradually achieving conscious
expression—“the unification of all citizens in one consciousness and in
one political and universal will.”24
Thus, at about the same time that Pellizzi engaged himself in the discussions concerning the functions, and the intrinsic character, of the corporative state, Gentile himself described what he understood to be the essentials of “Fascist democracy.” It was a conviction he had consistently held
both before and throughout, the Fascist period.
It was in that context that one is to understand Pellizzi’s references to
the development of corporativism as “democratic,” in the sense of being
governed by a the political leadership of a “given person or persons”
whose ideas were the incarnation of the will of an entire society. Historic
circumstances “had conferred authority” on that person or those persons—and it was that authority, and those persons, that informed the
entire corporative system—of which corporative agencies were to serve
22
Mussolini, “Il discorso dell’Ascensione,” Opera omnia (Florence: La fenice, 1953–65.
Hereafter Oo), vol. 22, p. 389. In 1936, Mussolini maintained that Italy “was a true democracy.” “Discorso di Milano,” in Oo, vol. 28, p. 70.
23
Panunzio, “L’Impero italiano del lavoro,” Gerarchia 9, no. 9 (September 1940),
p. 462.
24
Gentile, Dottrina politica del fascismo (Padua: CEDAM, 1937), p. 7.
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as extensions.25 What Pellizzi provided, on such occasions, was a synoptic
expression of the rationale of the Gentilean “democratic ethical state,”26
whose fully articulated rationale was to be found in the technical works
of Actualism.
It was clear that Pellizzi expected Fascism, as a political system, to work
because it had its source among “a new class of youthful heroes and thinkers” who had survived the sacrifices and carnage of the First World War—
and in whom the people of Italy could see themselves at their best. As an
aristocracy, the survivors of the trenches had been “selected” through the
very carnage of the war. They were to “initiate a new epoch” in the history
of Europe. Pellizzi argued that each significant period in history is initiated by just such “a new and heroic minority”27 in whom the masses find
their truest selves reflected.
The First World War had created circumstances in and through which
Italy, “as a poor, oppressed and friendless” nation, might seek its redemption through “internal unity and independence from foreigners.” In 1925,
Pellizzi had spoken of that redemption as coming through a state, led by
the “aristocracy of the trenches,” that enjoyed “priority before and above
all else”—a state that would render all the productive forces of the nation
its “direct organs,” a state that, as a consequence, would be capable of
“guaranteeing security against all domestic and foreign aggression.”28 The
rapid industrial development that would result would supply the arms
that would render Italy, once again as it had been in antiquity, one of the
“great powers.”
The argument, of course, was familiar and orthodox. It followed that
put together by Mussolini in the years that preceded the March on Rome
and was, in large part, anticipated by Gentile.29 Everyone among the national syndicalists was accustomed to calling upon revolutionary “elites”
to resolve the crises that had settled down upon Italy at the turn of the
twentieth century.30 No one had been particularly specific concerning the
criteria for admission into that aristocracy that would determine the future. They had all charged history with the responsibility of identifying
25
Pellizzi, “Corporazioni e autorità,” Critica fascista 16, no. 13 (1 May 1938), pp.
197–200.
26
Gentile regularly spoke of the Fascist state as “democratic” in precisely the sense
indicated. See Gentile, Origini e dottrina del fascismo (Rome: Libreria del Littorio, 1929),
sec. 13.
27
Pellizzi, Fascismo-aristocrazia, pp. 21, 22, 35.
28
Ibid., pp. 55, 77, 83.
29
See the account in A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of
Fascism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979); and Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, chaps. 4 and 6.
30
See the account in A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), chaps. 2–3.
THE FINAL ISSUES
173
those who would serve as the envisioned ruling “class.” Pellizzi wrote
that they would be “independent, inflexible and creative, finding within
themselves the inspiration, and the principles that govern their conduct.”
They would be “astute, strong, just, and of determined will,” capable of
anticipating futures with critical intelligence.31
Over time, it became evident to Pellizzi himself that if Fascism was to
generate and sustain such an “aristocracy,” it would be necessary to fashion some procedure that would assure the regular and predictable production of suitable candidates. Allusion to the personal properties he would
have such an elite evince was clearly not enough. He became involved in
a sustained exchange with other Fascist intellectuals concerning what
might be an appropriate selective procedure to accomplish Fascism’s selfsustaining purpose.32 Formal education, and institutional syndicalist and
corporativist organization, would provide the test beds for the selection
of those who would serve as the ruling political class.
By the time Fascism, as a system, had fully matured, its properties were
evident and all but universally recognized. That some expected corporative institutions to take on the democratic features familiar in a liberal
political environment was, at best, curious. In Fascist Italy, corporative
institutions were agencies of control—and Sergio Panunzio, about a year
before his death, was content to so describe them.
In 1943, Panunzio expected the workers’ and employers’ syndicates to
become more active in the economic undertakings of the state—but he
did not expect them to independently undertake initiatives. They were
consultative resources for the state, involved as the state was in a program
of projected economic self-sufficiency for the nation. The entities created
in the efforts at corporative arrangement of the economy interacted
among themselves and with the executive Ministry of Corporations. Of
all the corporative structures that had been been put together, a Comitato
corporativo centrale, a “Central Corporative Committee,” had been selected to serve as directive. Composed of few members, it operated with
far greater dispatch than the more cumbersome National Council of Corporations—and would, Panunzio suggested, probably be more effective
31
Pellizzi speaks of the expected ruling elite as “heroic, energetic and faithful.” Pellizzi,
Fascismo-aristocrazia, pp. 93, 101, 103, 113.
32
See Pellizzi, “Educazione fascista e classe dirigente,” Critica fascista 15, no. 16 (15
June 1937), pp. 275–78; “Educazione fascista e classe politica,” Critica fascista 15, no. 19
(1 August 1937); and the response Agostino Nasti and Bruno Fattori, “Obiezioni a Pellizzi,”
in Critica fascista 15, no. 17 (l July 1937), pp. 291–94; Nasti, “Conclusione con Pellizzi,”
Critica fascista 15, no. 21 (1 September 1937); and Nasti and Fattori, “Codicillo a Pellizzi,”
Critica fascista 15, no. 24 (15 October 1937), pp. 405–7. In this context, see Luca La Rovere, Storia dei GUF: Organizzazione, politica e miti della gioventu universitaria fascista,
1919–1943 (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003).
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than the new representative body, La Camera dei Fasci e delle corporazioni, that was to serve as a substitute for the original, pre-Fascist Camera,
the body that once included all the political parties, special interests, and
subgroups of the old liberal system.33
Panunzio saw the new economic control system as paralleling that of
the political control system that culminated in the Grand Council of Fascism—and was intended to accomplish the same results in the economic
that the Grand Council had achieved in the political arena. It would be
“institutionally representative” of the economic interests of the population in the same sense that the Grand Council would institutionally represent the political convictions of the general population.
The role of the Grand Council in the political system had been regularized only in 1928—after six years of its de facto rule. As the control arm
of the Partito nazionale fascista, it had become the principal political
organ of the state. Panunzio saw in the Central Corporative Committee
the economic counterpart of the Grand Council. Essentially all professional economic reflection would be conducted within the evolving corporative agencies gradually put together over almost two decades of Fascist
rule. Like the Grand Council that politically represented the masses, the
Central Corporative Committee represented the workers and employers
in the national economy.34
Both the Grand Council and the Central Corporative Committee were
dominated by Mussolini and the leaders of the party. They constituted
the “aristocracy” that Pellizzi had left to history and national challenge
to select. That such an aristocracy was representative of the nation’s
masses was confirmed, Fascist intellectuals maintained, by acclamation,
the consensus enjoyed by the regime.35
One sees in the system identified by Panunzio, and inferentially by Pellizzi, in 1943, at the close of the Fascist experiment, all the major elements
they had anticipated two decades before. In the very first years after the
revolution, Panunzio, like Pellizzi, saw the nation’s regeneration in the
restored strength of executive power—the power of “a modern sovereign
state, politically superior to everything” within its reach. At the very commencement of corporativism’s institutionalization, Panunzio told his audiences that Fascism filled the spaces between the individual and the state
33
Panunzio was prepared to countenance the prospect of the merger of the Central Corporative Committee with a “junta” of the emerging corporative Camera. See the discussion
in Carlo Costamagna, “Ancora su ’Gli sviluppi corporativi,”’ Lo stato 14, no. 1 (January
1943), pp. 20–22.
34
See the entire discussion in Panunzio, “Le corporazioni e la camera,” Lo stato 14, no.
3 (March 1943), p. 79–89.
35
See the discussion in Bruno Spampanato, Democrazia fascista (Rome: Politica nuova,
1933), pt. 3.
THE FINAL ISSUES
175
with representative socioeconomic bodies that must be legally recognized
and sustained, but reabsorbed, and rendered “subordinate to the state.”36
The continuity was palpable.
In effect, the major theoreticians of Fascism (with some notable exceptions)37 recognized in the arrangements of the late 1930s and the early
1940s the full political and economic maturation of the system. They had
never suggested that Fascism was anything other than hierarchical in
structure and authoritarian in form. The corporative system never had
any specific legislative function because it was never expected to have
such responsibility. It could, and did, provide norms for the behavior of
syndicates and did settle disputes between labor and capital—but its essential activities were consultative. It provided the occasion for drawing
all the active elements of the productive system into the process. It provided the opportunity for interaction at a level that would otherwise be
unavailable. Thus, during the first years of Fascist rule, Panunzio spoke,
as did Pellizzi, of “a strong state . . . an organic, powerful, active . . .
state, surrounded by a rich and varied architecture of classes organized
in syndicates and corporations of syndicates . . . with the entire state a
great army, a great discipline, a living hierarchy”—all in the service of
mobilizing all resources to the task of finally making Italy—a wretched
and underdeveloped nation—a great power, no longer to suffer the shame
of the past.
At the same time, participants in the process would develop a sense of
involvement, of efficacy. Italy was to proceed along its path of development employing a program of rapid economic growth and industrial
expansion, whose very “postulate, whose axiom . . . production and
expansion,” was to be achieved through the activation of all the “forces
of production under the direction of the sovereign state.”38 That was the
system created by the Fascist revolution. Few, if any, serious Fascist theoreticians expected anything else.
The suggestion frequently tendered by commentators on the history of
Fascism that corporativism had either proved a failure or a fraud is arguable at best. Corporativism served Fascism as it was meant to serve: as a
control mechanism for an economy that was in the process of expanding
and deepening in order to provide the material foundation for a “new
civilization”—one in which labor was not undertaken solely for material
rewards, but to contribute to the creation of a new world system that
36
See Panunzio, Lo Stato fascista (Bologna: Cappelli, 1925), pp. 56–57, 80, 87; and the
entire discussion in Vincenzo Zangara, La rappresentanza istituzionale (Bologna: Zanicelli,
1939).
37
The most important of whom was Ugo Spirito, whose ideas resurfaced later in the
Republic of Salò.
38
Panunzio, Che cos’è il fascismo (Milan: Alpes, 1924), pp. 14–16, 19, 24–25, 26, 53.
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would reflect all the complex virtues of a Third Rome. Once Italy committed itself to involvement in the Second World War, Panunzio identified
Fascism’s mission as creating a corporativist, organic, centralized and authoritarian “empire of labor,” destined to replace the “empire of gold”
created by the advanced capitalist, plutocratic Anglo-American powers.39
Dismissed as simple “rhetoric” by commentators at the time, such convictions revealed, in fact, the logic of the system. Elite rule, corporativism,
economic development, the generation and maintenance of popular consensus through “representative institutions” were all elements of a reasoned, if antiliberal and antidemocratic program of revolutionary transformation. It was a transformation intended to change the course of
Italian, European, and perhaps world history. All of this was duly recognized by its principal advocates—and, toward the end of Fascist rule, its
implications were transparent.
Pellizzi had always been aware of what the more remote policy implications of Fascist doctrine had been. He foresaw that Italy, for centuries
servile and humbled, emerging regenerate out of the crucible of the First
World War, could not be confined within the limits of the nation. A renewed Italy would transcend the territorial confines of a specific geographic place and extend itself over an empire, the geographic and political basis of a new world civilization. Pellizzi had long maintained that
Fascist Italy’s destiny was not specifically national, but imperial.40 The
aristocracy that would arise out of centuries of oppression, the carnage
of war, and the transformative tempering of revolution would be animated by a morality and a courage that could not be confined within the
egocentric, restrictive limits of family, corporation, or nation. The ultimate purpose of Fascism “could only be historic and moral,” to participate in the drama of the modern world: the ineluctable conflict of empires—that between the “industrial and colonial empire of Great Britain,
of the monetary and financial empire of the United States, and of a Germany that [had] embarked on an imperial course that will inevitably cast
it athwart that of the others.”41
Pellizzi went on to argue that while Fascism appeared inspired by an
idealism that was initally essentially nationalistic, the fact was that Actualism, understood in the fullness of its convictions, was not so privative.
For Gentile, while it was perfectly clear that the state was the informing
spirit of territoriality, language, customs, and subjects by virtue of which
we empirically distinguish nations—in the dialectic of world history, spirit
39
Panunzio, “L’Impero italiano del lavoro,” Gerarchia 19, 9 (September 1940), pp.
462–63.
40
See Pellizzi, Fascismo-aristocrazia, pp. 157, 164–65, 168.
41
Ibid., p. 173.
THE FINAL ISSUES
177
could not be confined to the nation as an exclusive vehicle. In the emerging
revolutionary reality of the mid-twentieth century, Pellizzi reminded his
readers that its past suggested that the form Italy might responsibly assume would be imperial. In his judgment, that ultimate form would be
animated by the same sustaining, evolving, and transcendental spirit identified by Actualism as informing the national state. For Pellizzi, the Fascist
state was destined to re-create the analog of the ancient empire of Rome—
as a new civilization in a new institutional form.
Pellizzi argued that the Rome of antiquity had not been a nation in the
generally recognized sense. He proceeded to point out that the subsequent
empire of the universal Church was not a nation either. The universal
Church that arose out of dying Rome was born as a faith—not a nation.
Out of its resurgent civilization and its rekindled faith, Fascism was destined to ultimately create not simply a nation animated by revolutionary
impulse, but an empire.42
Pellizzi early argued his case in Gentile’s Educazione politica, returning
to the theme with some regularity.43 The fact was that throughout the late
1920s and the years of the 1930s, the foreign policy orientations of Fascism became increasingly apparent. As early as 1931, Fascist intellectuals
took up, in earnest, specific geopolitical themes that had been given currency as early as the turn of the century.44
Nationalists, before the First World War, had referred to overseas colonies as necessary for the rebirth of the nation and the rehabilitation of the
peninsula. In the course of the maturation of the Fascist regime, there
were regular references to “strategic colonies” that assured access to, and
security of, waterways for both commercial and military purposes. There
were references to territories that would serve as habitable lands for excess populations; and there were allusions to territories possessed of raw
materials essential to the development of Italy’s industrial potential.45
All of this had been implicit and explicit in Mussolini’s public statements both before and after the March on Rome. The Fascist movement
had arisen in a world dominated by the advanced industrial powers. To
survive, the argument proceeded, Italy would have to develop major in-
42
Pellizzi, “Lo stato e la nazione,” Educazione politica 4, no. 6 (June 1926), pp. 317–20.
See Pellizzi, “Rinascimento politico,” Educazione politica, 4, no. 7 (July 1926), pp.
389–92.
44
Ernesto Massi and Giorgio Roletto made direct and indirect references to Mario Morasso, L’Imperialismo nel secolo XX (La conquista del mondo) (Milan: Treves, 1905); and
Edoardo Scarfoglio, Guerra della sterlina e del marco (Rome: Quattrini, 1915) who addressed some of the central issues of imperial expansion.
45
See Paola Maria Arcari, Le elaborazioni della dottrina politica nazionale fra l’unità e
l’intervento (1870–1914), 3 vols (Florence: Marzocco, 1934–1939).
43
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dustrial capabilities—and to do that, it would have to establish access to
industrial raw materials. To successfully transport those resources, it
would have to secure robust sealines of communication.
By the advent of the First World War, the advanced industrial powers
controlled more than 43 million square miles, or 84.4 percent of the
Earth’s surface. Locked within the confines of an inland sea, with egress
and entry controlled at Gibraltar and Suez by Great Britain, and its southern littoral dominated by both France and England, Italy’s sealines, over
which necessary raw materials made transit, were potentially subject to
the control of others.
Without resources, burdened by a population that exceeded the support
capacity of the soil, generating a fraction of the per capita income of the
advanced industrial nations, Italy had been a marginal country that, for
centuries, had been subject to the occupation and control of others. At the
conclusion of the First World War, Fascists were to call for equity in both
the distribution of the world’s material resources and its opportunities.
Even before his accession to power, Mussolini was prepared to argue that
“the political independence of a nation is a direct function of its economic
independence.” Without that independence, Italians would “remain slaves.
They were hostages to those who would provide them coal; hostages to
those who would provide them grain.”46 Mussolini called for rapid industrialization —a program that would occupy Italians for decades—in order
that Italy might develop the capabilities necessary to attempt the restoration of national lands lost to privileged powers during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The call would then be made for control of Italy’s
interior seas, the Tyrrhenian, Adriatic, and the Ionian—as well as the sealines of the Mediterranean47—so that the nation might have ready access
to sources where it could satisfy its raw material requirements.
Such a program implied an assertive and capable Italy. It implied expansion into ill-defined space beyond the boundaries of the peninsula. What
seemed clear, even during the first phases of Fascist rule, was that nationalism shaded off into a commitment to imperial design.
In a world controlled by the advanced industrial “plutocracies,” Fascist
intellectuals made the case for Italy’s expansion into areas where its meager natural resources might be supplemented48—and where it might find
and secure some strategic geographic advantage from which to defend the
sea routes, and gain access to the oceans, over which those resources
46
Mussolini, “Per essere liberi,” in Oo, vol. 16, pp. 105–6.
See the entire discussion in Glen Barclay, The Rise and Fall of the New Roman Empire
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973).
48
See, for example, Vito Beltani, Il problema delle materie prime (Rome: Tupini, 1940);
and Fernando Gori, Roma nel continente nero (Rome: Tupini, 1940).
47
THE FINAL ISSUES
179
might be transported.49 It was in that environment that Pellizzi’s early call
for Fascist imperial enterprise was welcomed—it was a freshet that, by
1941, made its contribution to what had become a tide.
It was in that year that Pellizzi’s National Institute of Fascist Culture
published an Italian translation of Carl Schmitt’s Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte50—a brochure that addressed the issue of the status of empire, and related political
configurations, in contemporary international law—marking, as well, the
increasing influence of National Socialist thought on Fascist intellectual
development.
Schmitt’s long essay on the status of “Extended Space” (Grossraum)
was to address an issue that occupied an important place in the development of Fascist doctrine through the trying years of the Second World
War. Italy had begun to put its proposed empire together by the middle
years of the 1930s. By 1940 it was enmeshed in the conflict that was to
see its destruction.
In June 1940, Italy declared war on France and Great Britain, and almost from its first involvement in the conflict, it had suffered reverses. As
a result, Italy became abjectly dependent on German assistance from
the very commencement of hostilities. Together with National Socialist
material assistance came intellectual influence that previously had been
almost absent.
The case of Carl Schmitt is of some consequence to those who would
understand something of the history of Fascist political thought during
the years of the Second World War. Some of Schmitt’s major essays, including his Der Begriff des Politischen, were translated into Italian as
early as 1935. In that year, Gentile’s publishing house, Sansoni, published
translations of several of Schmitt’s more important political essays as
Principii politici del Nazionalsocialismo (The political principles of national socialism).51
At the time, the reception received by the collection provided evidence
of the ideological differences that separated Fascist Italy and National
Socialist Germany. In the preface to the collection, Arnaldo Volpicelli
made his objections known without reluctance. As a Fascist intellectual
and a Gentilean, he felt compelled to speak of Schmitt’s “grave theoretical errors” that could only culminate in equally grievous “errors in
49
See the discussion in Giuseppe Maggiore, Imperialismo e impero fascista (Palermo:
Arceri e Agate, 1937).
50
Carl Schmitt, Il concetto d’impero nel diritto internazionale: Ordinamento dei grandi
spazi con esclusione delle potenze estranee, translated by L. Vannutelli Rey and with an
appendix by Franco Pierandrei (Rome: Biblioteca dell’I.N.C.F., 1941).
51
Carl Schmitt, Principii politici del nazionalsocialismo, selected and translated by D.
Cantimori, with a preface by A. Volpicelli (Florence: Sansoni, 1935).
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practice.”52 What some of those theoretical errors were, in Volpicelli’s
judgment, not difficult to determine. The discussion requires only some
preliminaries.
The differences that marked the reception of Schmitt’s essays in 1935
and that extended in 1941 indicated the extent of change that had taken
place in the intervening years. Schmitt’s long essay on the concept of “extended space” in international law was accorded an entirely different reception when it appeared in 1941 than had his essays of 1935.
In Schmitt’s essay on extended spaces, published by Pellizzi through the
agency of the National Institute of Fascist Culture in 1941, neither the
preface by L. Vannutelli Rey nor the appendix by F. Pierandrei pretended
to any criticism of the author’s complex claims. As will be contended,
some of the very ideas that provoked the critical response of Volpicelli in
the publication of 1935 were allowed articulation in 1941 without the
least negative response.
Schmitt’s brochure occupied itself with the juridical status of “hegemonic” states in international law. It addressed an issue that had been
made of emphatic interest by the conflict then raging. By 1940, it was
clear that the Axis powers—upon their anticipated victory—would
seek not only a redistribution of territories that would far exceed the
simple restoration of lands they might have lost in precedent wars, but
they expected to exercise dominant influence over politically independent nations.
It was reasonably plain that the Axis powers would each seek not only
to secure adequate “living space” (Lebensraum)—territory sufficient to
settle surplus population, provide necessary raw materials, and assure free
access to, and security of, sealines of communication—but would also
expect to exert hegemonic influence over lesser nations within their respective proximities. While such arrangements had traditionally been considered empires, Schmitt addressed himself to a more complex notion.
Schmitt spoke of “extended spaces” (Grossraüme) rather than “empires.” He sought to distingish the two through juridical and political
features. He held extended spaces to be fundamentally different from traditional empires, blocs, confederations, alliances, or simple living space.
Extended spaces shared features with all such entities, but were different
in critical ways.
For the purposes of his exposition on extended spaces, Schmitt emphasized the importance of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823—a piece of American public law that unilaterally sought to control relations between Europe
52
Arnaldo Volpicelli, “Prefazione”; Schmitt, Principii politici del nazionalsocialismo,
p. ix.
THE FINAL ISSUES
181
and the independent political nations of the Western hemisphere.53 In the
Monroe Doctrine, the government of the United States held that the Western hemisphere, and all the independent nations and territories therein, be
closed to both further colonization and European interference. Schmitt
held that the Monroe Doctrine produced an uncommon international “political space”—defined by a particular political idea—that was prototypic
of those unique political arrangements that he spoke of as “extended
spaces.” Such spaces, at the core of which might be a nation-state (as was
the case with the Monroe Doctrine),54 could extend over entire hemispheres and have only some of the defining properties of traditional empires or any of the other familiar politico-juridical international bodies.
In the course of his discussion, Schmitt reminded his readership that it
was still uncertain what the international legal status of the Monroe Doctrine was at its initiation, or what that status might be at the time of his
inquiry. Originally advanced as a piece of United States public law, and
sometimes defended as “not depending on technical legal right, but upon
policy and power,” and at other times, cited as a derivative of the international “right of legitimate defense,”55 the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 simply announced, unilaterally, that the Western hemisphere was no longer
open to European colonization nor European interference. Since its promulgation, until the time of Schmitt’s writing, the Doctrine served to restrict the extension of European influence into the American hemisphere.
Schmitt pointed out that not only had the United States insisted on a
reserve clause in international treaties that allowed its government to exclude any foreign intervention in the Western hemisphere, but at times,
the Washington foreign policy establishment urged other nations to each
formulate and implement their own “Monroe Doctrine.”56 At those times,
the United States seemed to favor an international community parsed into
defined extended spaces, each animated by an exclusive political idea.
Schmitt found in such delimitations of secured space the intimation of
an international principle, some fundamental premise that might constitute the legal framework for future international behaviors. He argued
53
On 28 April 1939, Hitler announced that National Socialism supported a policy like
that of the Monroe Doctrine for the new Germany. As cited in Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of
the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia, 1999), p. 78.
54
This is clearly implied in Schmitt’s discussion of the Monroe Doctrine of the United
States. The Monroe Doctrine served Schmitt as a model instantial case of “extended space”
acknowledged in the behavior of international powers, and yet the space involved did not
constitute, in law, an empire. See Schmitt, Il concetto d’impero nel diritto internazionale,
pt. 2.
55
Ibid., pp. 30 n. 2, 31, 33.
56
See ibid., p. 43.
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that variants of expanded spaces might come to constitute major components of a postwar international system.
Schmitt argued that a similar process could be observed throughout
history. There were arrangements in antiquity—“spheres of influence,”
“blocs,” and “contiguous territories” that, in our own time, are acknowledged as legally recognized entities. He was to argue that “extended
spaces,” distinguished by distinctive political doctrines, would constitute
international legal personalities in the future.
Schmitt anticipated that entities very much like his “extended spaces”
would soon make their appearance in the modern world. The modern
world required some principle of international law that would indulge
the political reality of hegemonic nations extending their influence over
geographic regions, regularizing its practice, in order to foster and sustain
peace. He expected that the future would see a polyarchic world system
composed of a still indeterminate set of polycentric extended spaces—and
that if the world sought peace, there should be international law governing their interaction.
The extended spaces Schmitt anticipated would involve peoples, each
politically conscious and possessed of a given political worldview and—
like the authors of the Monroe Doctrine—morally committed to the exclusion of any intervention on the part of representatives of alternative
doctrinal persuasion.57 Each such relatively closed system would be sustained by an inclusive “planned economy” governing both production
and distribution. Implicit in the conception of extended space is the supposition that such space would encompass an adequate material foundation for the survival of the populations involved. Schmitt’s notion of
Grossraum thus explicitly included the lesser notion of Lebensraum. It
is hard to convince oneself that Schmitt’s conception of a future world
composed of an international arrangement of mutually exclusive extended spaces did not involve a concern for the future of National Socialist Germany. It seemed reasonably clear that if Germany were to win the
war, it would be a hegemonic power that would dominate most of Europe
and perhaps a considerable part of Africa, and possibly Asia, as well. If
such an arrangement were to have anything more than the most temporary existence, it would have to evince all the properties of Schmitt’s extended space as well as possess an established international legal personality. It would have to be legally sustained by something more than the
happenstance and ad hoc qualities of the British Empire. An internation57
See ibid., pp. 38–40; and Alessandro Campi, “Introduction,” in Carl Schmitt, L’unità
del mondo e altri saggi (Rome: Antonio Pellicani, 1994), pp. 34–40. No attempt has been
made here to translate the typically Germanic title of Schmitt’s work. The Italians simply
translated it, inadequately, as “The Concept of Empire in International Law.”
THE FINAL ISSUES
183
ally recognized legal principle of “extended space” would provide such
arrangements legitimacy.58
Fascist thinkers seemed to have found Schmitt’s ideas of interest, but
they clearly were not matters of immediate concern. While Schmitt’s
views were accorded significant space in Fascist publications, there seems
to have been very little explicit support for them by Fascist theoreticians.59
Most of the Fascist literature that sought to provide a rationale for Italy’s
intervention in the Second World War alluded to those reasons that could
be identified with Italy’s “vital,” rather than those associated with
Schmitt’s “extended,” space needs.60 Little argument was specifically devoted to the advocacy of extended space aspirations.
All the arguments employed by Fascist apologists for Italy’s involvement as an ally of Germany in the Second World War invoked claims long
since made by Mussolini and identified by Schmitt as specifically “living
space” demands,61 rather than those made for an Italian “extended
space.”62 For all intents and purposes, those expectations that were to
figure as Fascist wartime incentives had already been made, in principle,
long before the advent of the Second World War. Even Schmitt specifically
identified them as Lebensraum, rather than Grossraum, claims.63 When
Fascist authors referred to “extended space” at all, they more frequently
than not spoke of “extended living space,” that is to say, a living space of
imperial dimension.64
58
Schmitt was suspected of ideological indifference by the SS. His views were not held
to be sufficiently National Socialist. This was apparently the reason Schmitt chose to concentrate on international affairs. His concept of “extended Grossraum” was the consequence.
Schmitt went on to make the case for internationally recognized extended spaces during
the “Cold War.” See Schmitt, “L’ordinamento planetario dopo la seconda guerra mondiale
(1962),” in L’Unità del mondo, pp. 321–44.
59
Roman Catholic publications were emphatically opposed to Schmitt’s conception. See
A. Messineo, S.J., Spazio vitale e grande spazio (Rome: Civiltà Cattolica, 1942).
60
See, for example, Lauro Mainardi, Nazionalità e spazi vitali (Rome: Cremonese,
1941); Domenico Soprano, Spazio vitale (Milan: Corbaccio, 1942); Virginio Gayda, Perchè
l’Italia e in Guerra (Rome: Capriotta, n.d.).
61
Schmitt, Il concetto d’impero nel diritto internazionale, p. 49.
62
Mussolini regularly referred to free passage through the Mediterranean and the Straits
of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal as vital issues for Italy, while they were matters of convenience for Great Britain. See Mussolini, “Discorsi di Milano,” in Oo, vol. 28, pp. 70–71.
In the Italian translation, Schmitt refers to Mussolini’s statement as alluding to “uno spazio
vitale.” Schmitt, Il concetto d’impero nel diritto internazionale, p. 42, n. 2.
63
See the discussions in Virginio Gayda, Profili della nuova Europa: L’economia di domani (Rome: Giornale d’Italia, 1941); F. S. Orlando, L’economia bellica ed i problemi della
nuova Europa (Milan: Bocca, 1941); and Gori, Roma nel continente nero. There is no reference to “extended spaces” as part of the rationale for the war in any of these texts.
64
See Soprano, Spazio vitale, pp. 71, 72. Soprano was fully familiar with Schmitt’s notion
of Grossraum, and speaks of specifically Lebensgrossraum, “economic extended space,”
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Although there clearly were instances of more systematic allusions to
Schmitt’s “extended space,” the more frequent Fascist appeal was made
to what is easily identified as traditional empire and spheres of influence.
As early as 1922, Mussolini described the projected Fascist foreign policy as predicated on a “civilizing national or imperial society . . . informed by a state.”65 Out of that traditional conception, Fascist ideologues characteristically anticipated the advent not of anything that had
the appearance of Schmitt’s extended space, but of a traditional empire.66 Over the Balkans, and parts of Eastern Europe, for example, Fascist Italy expected to project a presence in the manner of a traditional
sphere of influence.
It is not that Fascist doctrine could not accommodate Schmitt’s conception of a pluriform international system of extended spaces. It was simply
the case that Fascist intellectuals, like Pellizzi, had already outlined a future for Italy that was captured in the traditional conception of empire
and spheres of influence. There clearly were not many Fascist thinkers
prepared to embrace Schmitt’s notions. Among Fascist thinkers, Schmitt’s
notion of extended space was superfluous. Fascist doctrine found expression in the standard Fascism geopolitical conception of empire.67 Most
Fascist intellectuals, when they referred to Schmitt’s notion of “extended
space” at all, simply reduced it, explicitly or implicity, to the dimensions
of what had become known to National Socialist thinkers as Lebensraum,
“living space.”
For Fascist intellectuals, the material necessity of living space was enhanced by a conviction in the spiritual, imperial, “civilizing” mission of
their revolution. That had been part of Fascist doctrine since its first appearance. Pellizzi had given it expression, and in its general outline, the
concept of an imperial, civilizing mission was fully compatible with the
sustaining thought of Gentile’s Actualism.
In one of the journals of the time most favorably disposed to Schmitt’s
ideas, the effort to make the case for the creation of a postwar system of
extended spaces quickly dissolved into what was clearly a reaffirmation
and of “securing economic spaces.” See pp. 6, 17, 57, 59, 60, 67, 71–73. The elements of
such spaces are demographics, raw materials, ocean access, and marketing requirements.
65
See Mussolini, “Dal malinconico tramonto liberale all’aurora fascista della nuova
Italia” and “Stato, antistato e fascismo,” in Oo, vol. 18, pp. 260, 439. See the reference in
Mainardi, Nazionalità e spazio vitale, p. 101.
66
See, for example, Giuseppe Maggione, Imperialismo e impero fascista (Palermo: Arceri
e Agate, 1937).
67
In fact, among German theorists speculating on future international arrangements,
there was a tendency to limit their discussion to what was called “living spaces.” Works
like Paul Schmidt’s collection, Revolution im Mittelmeer: Der Kampf um dem italienischen
Lebensraum (Berlin: Volk und Reich, 1940), simply repeated standard Fascist arguments
concerning the “empire.”
THE FINAL ISSUES
185
of Fascist Italy’s claim to an adequate living space, together with some
trappings of a more-or-less standard sphere of influence arrangement established by voluntary association.68 This was, by and large, the general
reception Schmitt’s ideas were accorded by Pellizzi and most other Fascist
intellectuals.
In retrospect, however interesting, Schmitt’s concept of extended spaces
was not really the most arresting feature of his writings. In general, Fascist
intellectuals digested the account without difficulty. By and large,
Schmitt’s reflections on that subject were treated as peripheral to Fascist
interests. There was, however, a minor theme in Schmitt’s thought that
was to create very special problems for Fascist intellectuals.
Until 1938, the notion of biological racism played a minor, and relatively benign, role in the formulations of Fascist ideology. Even with the
promulgation of the “Manifesto of Fascist Racism” in that year, and the
formal character that the issue thereby assumed, most Fascist intellectuals
managed it without serious doctrinal dissonance.69
Even in that more formal context, the nature of “Fascist racism” was
fundamentally different from that of Hitler’s Germany.70 It was that difference that was to make of Schmitt’s writings a matter of considerable importance. The occasion of Schmitt’s essays precipitated discussions that
were to have portentous consequences for Fascist Italy.
That should not be understood to suggest that Schmitt was a racist of
the sort one would expect to find among National Socialists. Schmitt’s
role in the ensuing discussion was not a consequence of his specific racism.
Whatever racism was to be found in his work was marginal. The theme
had been given vast currency in the Germany of his time, and it would
have been most unusual if no mention at all of biological race appeared
in his work.
In an earlier work, Schmitt had spoken of a kind of “Gleichartigkeit,”
a “homogeneity,” that assured affinities between a ruler and those he
68
See Pier Silverio Leicht, “Osservazioni sul problema del grande spazio e spazio vitale,”
Lo stato 14, no. 4 (April 1943), pp. 97–110.
69
This was not true of Gentile. Gentile was alienated by the “Manifesto.” He considered
the effort by the Fascist government to attempt any accommodation whatever with racism
to be a gross moral infraction. See the discussion in Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, chap. 8. For
the nature of Fascist racism, see the discussion in A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism,
chap. 6. The antimiscegenation laws of the late 1930s, dealing with Italian relations with
the population of Ethiopia, were prompted by political, rather than biological, concerns.
See appendix A of The Ideology of Fascism, pp. 383–86.
70
In this context, see the discussion in Renzo De Felice, Fascism: An Informal Introduction to Its Theory and Practice (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1976), pp. 40–41, Interpretations of Fascism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 10–11; and Storia
degli ebrei italiani sotto i fascismo, new enlarged ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), pp. 27–77.
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ruled. That homogeneity rendered governance possible.71 In his Staat, Bewegung, Volk, translated into Italian in 1935, Schmitt spoke more expressly of those affinities. They were apparently attributed to a shared
racial heritage.
In the text, he speaks of National Socialist leadership predicated on the
“equality of race”—with minority leadership of a nation legitimized by
the “shared and infallible contact between the leader and his followers”—
its shared and infallible quality, the product of racial homogenity.72
It was that element of racism to which Volpicelli and Delio Cantimori
had objected in their respective introductions to Staat, Bewegung, Volk
in 1935.73 Fascist doctrinal objections to biological racism as a determinant in the political history of communities were, at that time, general
and emphatic. By 1941, by the time Schmitt’s essay on extended spaces
appeared, the situation had dramatically altered.
By that time, Fascist Italy was abjectly dependent on National Socialist
Germany for the arms and collateral support without which the nation
could not survive. The Fascist–National Socialist alliance had become a
matter of simple survival for Italy. Circumstances thus militated against
continued Fascist criticism of National Socialist doctrine. As a consequence neither Pellizzi, Vannutelli Rey, nor Pierandri, in dealing with
Schmitt’s ideas, raised any objections to anything said in the essay of
1941.74 Those were the conditions that rendered it possible for the racist
conjectures of National Socialist theoreticians to insinuate their way into
academic and popular literature in Fascist Italy without difficulty.
At about the time that Pellizzi’s National Institute of Fascist Culture
published Schmitt’s brochure on the international juridical status of extended spaces, Carlo Costamagna’s journal Lo stato began publishing,
with some regularity, Schmitt’s essays on a variety of subjects.75
With the appearance of Schmitt’s essay on extended spaces, Carlo
Costamagna, the editor of Lo stato and an important Fascist ideologue,
proceeded to expand the discussion beyond the specific issues joined in
the text. In an essay of his own, in attempting a credible response to
Roman Catholic criticism76 of the entire thesis of extended spaces, Costa71
See the discussion in Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Munich: Duncker und Humblot,
1928), pp. 234–37.
72
Schmitt, Principii politici del nazionalsocialismo, pp. 176, 191–92, 226–27.
73
Arnaldo Volpicelli, “Preface,” and Delio Cantimori, “Note sul nazionalsocialismo,”
in Schmitt, Principii politici del nazionalsocialismo, pp. v–x, 1–42.
74
L. Vannutelli Rey “Preface” and F. Pierandri, “Appendice: La politica e il diritto nel
pensiero di Carl Schmitt,” in Schmitt,Il concetto d’impero nel diritto internazionale, pp. 1–
12, 95–143.
75
These essays have been conveniently collected as Schmitt, L’Unità del mondo.
76
The earlier cited volume by Father Messineo, Spazio vitale e grande spazio, was specifically referred to by Leicht, “Osservazioni sul problema del grande spazio e spazio vitale,”
THE FINAL ISSUES
187
magna gave it a special emphasis that did not even appear in Schmitt’s
original discussion. Costamagna, in discussing the human character of
the projected extended spaces, spoke of them as involving “cognate peoples” (popoli affini). He argued that the subject peoples in any extended
space would have to somehow share “affinities”—apparently in order
to assure their “harmonious and fruitful collaboration.”77 He went on
to speak of a consequent “organic” collaboration of such peoples
throughout Italian history, first in the early years of the making of the
Roman empire, and subsequently in the making of the universal Roman
Catholic Church.
He went on to suggest that that such collaboration could only be the
product of the working together of cognate peoples of “Aryan race.”78
Costamagna went on to speak of “ethnic” and cultural affinities as
though true collaboration in the anticipated extended spaces would require that the peoples involved share some discriminable biopsychological similarities.79 There was the evident suggestion, although significantly
qualified, that the requisite collaboration was the result of unspecified
biological factors.
Costamagna was familiar with Schmitt’s work, and in one place referred to the necessity of preserving the “spiritual forces” that sustain a
“nation’s identity”—immediately thereafter alluding to Schmitt’s Verfassungslehre, where we find Schmitt speaking of the “homogeneity” of a
population as the necessary condition for the integrity of any political
arrangement.80 There is little doubt that the homogeneity to which
Schmitt alluded on that occasion was biological or racial. In 1933 and
1934, Schmitt’s characterization of the Volk—one element of the trinity
of “state, movement, people” of which Germany’s National Socialist
ideological persuasion was composed—was clearly biological and racial.
Those Fascist intellectuals who commented on the Italian translation of
Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen and his Staat, Bewegung, Volk
clearly recognized as much. The homogeneity that assured the harmonious compatibility of the governed and their leaders, as well as the affinities that bound peoples together in extended spaces, was conceived to
be biological.81
p. 102. Messineo made himself an informed critic of Schmitt’s theses and had published
several pieces of criticism prior to the publication of the cited volume.
77
Carlo Costamagna, “Grande spazio e etnarchia imperiale,” Lo stato 13, no. 1 (January
1942), p. 3.
78
Ibid., p. 4.
79
See ibid., pp. 9 and 12.
80
Schmitt, Verfassungslehre, pp. 234–35.
81
See the entire discussion in Schmitt, “I caratteri essenziali dello stato nazionalsocialista,” in L’Unità del mondo, pp. 175–80.
188
CHAPTER EIGHT
Costamagna was circumspect in dealing with Schmitt’s conjectures concerning the factors that rendered leaders and followers, and associated
peoples, “organically compatible.” He warned his readers, for example,
not to accept any simplisms concerning the “racial character” to be attributed the “Aryan” populations of proposed extended spaces. He maintained that he would ascribe the “ethnic affinities” to which he made
reference in his exposition more to a “spiritual,” than to a simple biological, source. He seemed prepared to ascribe those affinities to which he
alluded to the effects of a life shared in a “determinate civilization.”82
For his part, Schmitt recognized that the biological racism that served
as a linchpin of National Socialism was absent from Fascist doctrine.83
Costamagna’s tentativeness in discussing the racism of Schmitt’s account
suggested that he was well aware of the sensitivity of the subject.
Over the years, Costamagna had come to serve as a member of a nationalist-Catholic faction among Fascist intellectuals. An early collaborator
of Giovanni Gentile, he had become increasingly alienated over time—
first because Gentile had proven more a statist than a nationalist, and
later because the Church of Rome identified absolute idealism as heretical.
Costamagna was born in Quiliano, Savona, on 21 September 1881. He
trained as a jurist and served as a judge in the Italian courts. He early
joined the Fascist movement and after the March on Rome served with
Gentile as Secretary of the Council of Eighteen, charged by Mussolini
with the Fascist reform of the Italian constitution. Costamagna continued
to serve the regime, throughout its tenure, by assisting in the drafting of
corporative legislation and as a professor of corporative law at the University of Ferrara.
Costamagna’s alienation from Actualism probably arose primarily out
of his commitment to Roman Catholicism. By the last years of the regime,
Costamagna’s opposition to the philosophy of Gentile was both transparent and categorical. He employed every opportunity to cite what he took
to be evidence of Fascism’s ultimate commitment to something other than
Actualism—to “the traditions of Italian civilization,” for example, and
“to Christian and Roman Catholic spiritualism.”84
82
Costamagna, “Grande spazio e ethnarchia imperiale,” p. 12. It is not clear how this is
made compatible with the distinction Costamagna makes between “ethnicity” and “culture,” since in the immediately subsequent sentence he quotes Adolf Hitler referring to
Europe as a “racial and cultural expression” as though the two concepts were separate
and distinct.
83
Schmitt, “Faschistische und Nationalsozialistische Rechtswissenschaft,” Deutsche Juristen Zeitung no. 13 (1936), pp. 787–89.
84
See the unsigned review of Stefano Mazzilli’s I caratteri e l’originalità della filosofia del
fascismo (Florence: La Vela, 1943) in Lo stato 14, no. 4 (April 1943), p. 125.
THE FINAL ISSUES
189
In 1940, in one of his last major works, Costamagna’s rejection of Gentile’s Actualism, as a Fascist philosophy, was explicit.85 More interesting
for our purposes is the fact that, like the first organized Italian nationalists
of the Nationalist Association, Costamagna conceived Italians defined, in
part, by virtue of their “ethnicity.” As early as 1905, Enrico Corradini
had spoken of the nation being composed of “ethnographic” material.
More emphatically still, he identified the nation as an “ethnarchic” polity.86 Apparently still resonating with such notions, Costamagna, in 1942,
was to identify the anticipated Fascist extended space he found suggested
in Schmitt’s work as “an ethnarchic empire.”87
Gentile, convinced as he was of the irreducibly “spiritual” essence of
the state—and that it was the state that informed nations or empires—
refused to identify any material properties as necessary to establish their
coherence. Costamagna had no such reservations. He was prepared, without hesitation, to consider ethnicity as a factor in the shaping of the nation
in a fashion totally unacceptable to Gentile. For Gentile, one was as responsible for one’s nationality as one was responsible for one’s allegiance.
Neither biology, anthropology, nor ethnicity altered that. Nationality
was, for Gentile, a moral choice.
Very early in his career, when the suggestion was made that race might
be an historical determinate, Gentile forthrightly dismissed the possibility.88 However “ethnicity” was to be understood, Gentile dismissed as
“naturalism” any appeal to its efficacy as an historic agent. The notion
that a human being’s biology might shape his or her nationality or moral
allegiance was rejected by Actualists as not only epistemologically objectionable but morally repugnant.
As a case in point, there is no evidence and much counterevidence that
Gentile ever entertained any form of anti-Semitism. The entire notion was
contrary to his philosophical and ethical convictions.89 Costamagna, on
the other hand, was prepared to fulminate against Jews whenever the
occasion presented itself. He made a special point of publishing anti-Semitic literature,90 and in his own doctrinal statements, while he granted
that the Jews, as a group, did not demonstrate a “racial identity in the
85
Costamagna, Dottrina del fascismo, pp. 31, 33, 149.
Enrico Corradini, “La vita nazionale” and “Nazionalismo e democrazia” in Discorsi
politici (1902–1923) (Florence: Vallecchi, 1923), pp. 36, 43, 159.
87
Costamagna, “Grande spazio e etnarchia imperiale,” pp. 1–18.
88
Gentile, Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (Bari: Laterza, 1924), p. 171.
89
See Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, chap. 8.
90
See, for example, the review in Lo stato of Siro Conti, Pervertimenti giudaici nella
filosofia (Milan: Criterion, 1942) in Lo stato 13, no. 11 (November 1942), p. 299.
86
190
CHAPTER EIGHT
anthropological sense,” they did “constitute a serious threat to the spiritual integrity of the people of Europe.”91
All of that was intolerable to Actualists—and never supported by Pellizzi. Costamagna, unconstrained by the philosophical tenets of Actualism, proceeded to make political and moral distinctions predicated on
“ethnic” differences. Throughout the discussions that were to follow
among Fascist intellectuals, “ethnicity” remained a term intrinsically
vague and ambiguous. It was to perform, nonetheless, in critical fashion
in Costamagna’s interpretation of Schmitt’s conception of extended and
living space.
The Fascist responses to the entire notion that enlarged or extended
living spaces might in any way be influenced by “biological determinants”
is instructive. It was not uncommon for Fascist commentators to object
to the suggestion that biology might be a factor in the formation of extended or living spaces—on the grounds that Fascist doctrine was based
on principles that were “spiritual” and “ethico-political” rather than
“material.”92 In the months and years that were to follow, those convictions were to be sorely tested.
All the questions prompted by such matters were to torment Fascist
doctrine through the last years of the regime. They were to involve Fascist
intellectuals in complex and painful doctrinal disputes that were to savage
some and alienate more. They were to make the final tragic years of Fascism more tragic still.
91
Costamagna, Dottrina del fascismo, p. 198.
See Gelsy Coppiello, “Grandi spazi reali e falsi,” Lo stato 14, no. 2 (February 1943),
pp. 52–53.
92
CHAPTER NINE
Doctrinal Interlude: The Initiatic Racism
of Julius Evola
BY THE LATE 1930s, Fascist Italy, having established itself as a serious
actor on the European continent, turned its attention almost exclusively
to foreign affairs.1 It was during the years of the late 1930s that Italy
attempted to establish its place among the constellation of European powers. Mussolini sought to engage Germany as a dissatisfied power—in an
effort to respond to its demands—in an attempt to stabilize Europe. It
quickly became evident that Germany could not be satisfied—and that
the major powers of Europe were disposed to appease Adolf Hitler’s aggressive initiatives at what appeared to Mussolini to be Italy’s expense.
Mussolini’s efforts, however unrealistic, were an attempt to contain National Socialist Germany. By the mid-1930s, it became increasingly clear
that Germany was not to be contained.
It was within that fateful context that Mussolini sought to make evident
to the advanced industrial powers that Fascist Italy, whatever the circumstances in continental Europe, would seek “living space” in Africa. He
was convinced that both England and France had implicitly acknowledged the justice of his case. Italy had one of Europe’s highest population
densities, and a dearth of subsoil resources; Mussolini was convinced that
both France and England could not fail to see the merits of Italy’s colonial
claims. Pre-Fascist Italy had long evinced interest in expansion in the
Mediterranean and Africa—at a time when other European nations had
all but occupied the entire African continent.2 Whatever Mussolini’s convictions, however, the position of both France and England, should Italy
embark on aggression anywhere in Africa, was ambiguous.
Mussolini had long argued that without secure access to raw materials,
a developing Italy would be denied political and economic independence
and political equality.3 Ethiopia had been long considered just such a
1
See the account in Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Gli anni del consenso, 1929–36
(Turin: Einaudi,1974), chap. 4.
2
See, for example, Mussolini, “Discorso di Piazza Belgioioso,” Opera omnia (Florence:
La fenice, 1953–65. Hereafter Oo), vol. 16, pp. 300–1, “Italia e Mediterraneo: L’Egitto
indipendente?” in Oo, vol. 18, p. 77.
3
See Mussolini, “Per rinascere e progredire: Politica orientale,” in Oo, vol. 14, pp. 225–
27; “Per essere liberi,” in Oo, vol. 16, pp. 104–6, “Manifesto dei fasci per le elezioni generale,” in Oo, vol. 16, pp. 264–65.
192
CHAPTER NINE
source of those resources required by Italian industrial expansion.4 After
long and complex negotiations, Mussolini proceeded with his war against
Ethiopia—possessed of a certain understanding that the undertaking
would not be strenuously resisted by either France or England. Whatever
Mussolini believed, the aggression in Ethiopia was to prove fateful.
The war in Ethiopia saw Great Britain leading the demand for League
of Nations’ sanctions against Fascist Italy. Britain’s actions against Italy
seemed to confirm Mussolini’s long-held conviction that Italy’s interests, as
a “proletarian nation,” would always be obstructed by those powers that
were “sated.”5 Only Germany, of all the major European powers, was prepared to assist Italy in the pursuit of what Mussolini had long considered
the just interests of a resource-poor, late-developing industrial aspirant.6
The immediate consequence was an increasing rapprochement between
National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy. With the outbreak of the
civil war in Spain in 1936, their bilateral relations intensified. Both Germany and Italy provided material assistance to the Spanish nationalists,
while the Soviet Union and the activists in France and England supported
the leftist government. By that time, Fascist Italy and National Socialist
Germany were almost universally considered antidemocratic political and
military allies.
In October 1936, Germany and Italy signed a secret protocol that outlined their common foreign policy objectives. In November, Germany and
Imperial Japan entered into an anti-Comintern pact directed against the
Soviet Union. A year later, Italy acceded to the pact.
At the same time, Hitler pursued his policy of seeking to integrate Austria into the new Reich. Once again he courted Mussolini. With Fascist
Italy finding itself obstructed in its foreign policy objectives by Britain and
France, Hitler considered the time propitious to attempt a military and
political alliance with Mussolini. In September 1937, Mussolini accepted
Hitler’s invitation to visit resurgent Germany.
Both the reception and the impressive display of German arms clearly
overwhelmed Mussolini. Fewer and fewer differences separated Italy and
Germany in terms of foreign policy. On 29 September 1937, Mussolini
announced that Fascism and National Socialism shared much in terms of
a worldview—a rejection of “historical materialism” and a corresponding
commitment to the efficacy of determined, courageous, and tenacious
4
See Mussolini, “Il discorso della mobilitazione,” in Oo, vol. 27, pp. 159–60; see “La
necessità di espanzione dell’Italia in Africa,” and “Politica di vita,” in Oo, vol. 27, pp. 160–
65; and Carlo de Biase, L’Impero di “facetta nera” (Rome: Il Borghese, 1966), chap. 1.
5
See Mussolini, “Noi e l’estero,” in Oo, vol. 18, pp. 274–75.
6
Mussolini always identified Italy as a “late developing nation,” having emphatic needs
that the “plutocratic nations” were not likely to respect. See Mussolini, “La riforma della
scuola,” in Oo, vol. 20, pp. 129–30.
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
193
will. He alluded to their joint emphasis on the dignity of labor, and the
role of youth in restorative revolution. He spoke of the necessities of economic independence and corresponding military preparedness that characterized both revolutionary regimes. As a consequence, Mussolini committed himself to “a firm solidarity between the two revolutions” in an
“Italo-German friendship consecrated both in the policies and in the
hearts of both nations.”7 In November 1937, Mussolini indicated that
Fascist Italy would no longer obstruct Germany’s efforts to incorporate
Austria into the Reich. After that, developments proceeded very rapidly.
By the beginning of 1938, Italian and German intellectuals were meeting
with greater and greater frequency in discussions concerning economic,
cultural, military, and political matters. In the course of those meetings
extraneous National Socialist ideological material was introduced that
began to influence the character and content of Fascist doctrine.
Issues that involved the worldview of National Socialism more and more
frequently impinged on Fascism. The most irritating incidents turned on
the fact that many Italian Jews, serving in the ranks of the Partito nazionale
fascista, were interacting with their National Socialist counterparts in symposia and conferences—to everyone’s discomfort. The Fascist foreign ministry requested that Jews absent themselves from such encounters—in the
first semiofficial act of anti-Semitism in Fascist Italy.8
Until that time, official anti-Semitism was unknown in Fascist Italy. In
1933, Mussolini told Emil Ludwig that anti-Semitism did not exist in
Italy. “Italian Jews,” he went on, “have comported themselves well as
citizens, and as soldiers they have fought courageously. They occupy the
most prestigeous positions in our universities, in the military, in our financial houses. Many are general officers.”9
That was a position Mussolini had consistently held throughout
his public life. A. O. Olivetti, one of his close associates, a syndicalist,
and subsequently a national syndicalist, who clearly contributed to Mussolini’s ideological maturation in the period before the First World War,
was Jewish. Over the life span of the regime, there were proportionately
more Jews in the Partito nazionale fascista then there were in the general
population.
Fascist “racism” throughout the period between 1922 and 1938, however distinctive, was essentially benign—and shared little, if any sub7
Mussolini, “Il discorso di Berlino,” in Oo, vol. 28, p. 251; and “Riporto dalla Germania. . . . Un’impressione profonda e ricordi indelebili,” in Oo, vol. 28, p. 253.
8
The entire history of the Italian Jews under Fascism is detailed in Renzo De Felice,
Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, new enlarged ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1993).
9
Mussolini, in Emil Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini (Verona: Mondadori, 1933), p. 72.
194
CHAPTER NINE
stance, with the malevolent racism so prevalent across the Alps.10 None
of the major Fascist intellectuals were racists of the sort one found in
National Socialist environs. In fact, since many, if not most, of the principal ideologues of Fascism were Actualists, they had principled objections
to attributing human behavior to material—that is, biological—causes.
They simply could not accept the proposition that an entire population,
characterized by ill-defined “racial” traits, could be held, as a body, guilty
of anything.
After considerable resistance, National Socialist influence began to penetrate some circles in Fascist Italy. Anti-Semitism and forms of biological
racism began to surface in some publications. In general, however, there
was a concerted effort to distinguish Fascist “racism” from that emanating from the north. It was not unusual, before the outbreak of the Second
World War, for Fascist intellectuals to oppose themselves to some of the
major elements of National Socialist racism.11
Until the actual publication of the official “Manifesto of Fascist Racism,” biological racism, as it was understood by National Socialist theorists, had literally no place in Fascist doctrine. Thereafter, the Fascist position became increasingly confused.
It was clear to anyone who understood Fascism as a doctrine that Gentile, and most Actualists, were opposed to any racism that shared significant properties with the racism of Hitler’s Germany.12 In that context,
marginal persons, who had long been dismissed as lacking any significance whatever, made their reappearance among Fascist intellectuals. Giovanni Preziosi, Italy’s only committed anti-Semite, suddenly resurfaced
together with Julius Evola, whom serious Fascists were to forever dismiss
as the “Magic Baron.”13
It was into that tumult that the ideas of Carl Schmitt were introduced.
When his discussion of the imperialism of “extended spaces” somehow
invoked the vague suggestion that the populations of such spaces might
10
See Mussolini’s comments ibid., pp. 70–72. An account of Fascist racism is provided
in A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York:
Free Press, 1969), chap. 6.
11
As late as 1941, one can find in Fascist doctrinal literature the insistence that National
Socialist racism was “antithetical” to that of Fascism. Enzo Leoni, Mistica del razzismo
fascista (Rome: Quaderni del Scuola di mistica fascista Sandro Italico Mussolini, 1941), pp.
29–40, 63. National Socialist racism is identified as “primordial and absolute”—while Fascist racism “contains, at its very foundation, the germs of a new humanism . . . necessary
. . . to resolve the moral crises of our time” (p. 54).
12
See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001), chap. 8.
13
See the account in H. T. Hansen, “Introduction: Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors,” in
Julius Evola, Men among the Ruins: Post-war Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002), p. 91.
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
195
conceivably share some important “racial affinities,” those Fascist intellectuals long opposed to Actualism for a variety of reasons seized the
opportunity to attempt its definitive displacement by making appeal to
biological racism.
By 1941, it had become transparent to everyone that Fascist Italy found
itself in desperate military circumstances. On the battlefield, Fascist forces
were in retreat everywhere. Only German intervention might recover
the situation.
The consequence was that a closer, more intimate union with National
Socialist Germany recommended itself. Some intellectuals urged the abandonment of what had been ideological orthodoxy. To close the distance
between Fascism and National Socialism, they advocated an infusion of
“hard” racism into what was perceived as an ideological system that was
too “humanitarian.” One of the consequences produced by those most
singular circumstances was the reappearance of that eccentric intellectual
who had early been dismissed by every Fascist critic as a person of no
consequence: Baron Julius Cesare Andrae Evola.14
Evola was born in Rome on the 19 May in 1898, scion of an old aristocratic family. On his return home after service in the First World War, he
was to try to find himself in poetry, in Dadaism, and in nonrepresentational
art in general—in Futurism, theosophy, anthroposophy, and philosophical
solipsism. For a brief while, immediately after the succession of Mussolini
to power, Evola identified himself with political anti-Fascism. At the same
time, he became more and more involved in the intensive study of Far
Eastern “spiritual,” “metaphysical,” and “initiatic” thought.15
By 1925, Evola was attempting to resolve the problems of philosophical
idealism by pursuing epistemological problems into ontological conclusions that made the “Absolute Individual”— initially understood as the
sensate self—somehow “responsible” for all “reality.”16 What resulted
was a more than quaint “magic idealism”—part Tantric, part primitive
Buddhist, part pre-Christian pagan, and part medieval alchemy. Ugo Spirito, one of the most prominent of the Fascist intellectuals of the time,
14
The best intellectual biography of Evola is that of H. T. Hansen, cited in Evola, Men
among the Ruins. A bibliography of the works of Evola is available in Renato Del Ponte,
“Julius Evola: Una bibliografia, 1920–1994,” Futuro presente 3, no. 6 (Spring 1995), pp.
27–70.
15
Evola was early identified as a representative of the “most rigorous and most extreme
position in all of European dadaism”—at the same time that he was an express anti-Fascist.
See Marco Rossi, “Evola e la pubblicista antifascista liberal-democratica; 1924–1925,”
ibid., p. 98 and pp. 97–106.
16
The most easily accessible arguments are to be found in Julius Evola, Saggi sull’idealismo magico (Rome: Antanor, 1925); L’individuo e il divernire del mondo (Rome: Libreria
di scienze e lettere,1926); and L’uomo come potenza: I tantra nella loro metafisica e nei
loro metodi di autorealizzazione magica (Rome: Atanor, 1927).
196
CHAPTER NINE
called it a product of “a mania for originality at whatever cost, a vanity
for new formulations, and a poorly concealed inability to suffer the moral
discipline of an idealism that is adequately understood.” He dismissed the
young Evola as a pretentious poseur who had given himself over to a
Europeanized version of Eastern mysticism—a kind of fictive “anti-intellectualism” that, in fact, revealed itself as nothing other than an exotic
and stilted intellectualism.17
It was during this period that Evola, for reasons that cannot be determined with any confidence, decided to attempt to insinuate himself into
the intellectual ranks of institutional Fascism. At almost the same time,
he attempted to ingratiate himself with Giovanni Gentile—whose Actualism all but dominated the cultural landscape.18
Whatever Evola’s motivation, in 1928 he published his first overtly political work, Imperialismo pagano: Il fascismo dinnanzi al pericolo EuroCristano,19 a volume that contained many of the ideas he had already
advanced in an article published the year before in one of the official
journals of Fascism.20 The sentiments contained in Imperialismo pagano
were painfully clear.
Fascism, for Evola, as it had manifested itself in Mussolini’s revolution,
was a material thing, without a soul. It was a revolution that had mobilized to its standards some of the dregs of society. It had been “born of
compromise, fed on rhetoric and the petty ambitions of petty people. The
state system it fabricated [was] uncertain, ill-conceived, violent, unfree,
and subject to equivocations.” What Fascism needed was a soul—to be
governed not by leaders chosen by chance or popular appeal, but by those
animated by the “true Wisdom” of “cosmic Masters.” Only in those circumstances would people spontaneously sort themselves into castes—as
they had in the antiquity of China, Persia, and Egypt—to thereby provide
structure for a “true state.” A caste arrangement would provide “uncon17
Ugo Spirito, “L’idealismo magico,” L’idealismo italiano e i suoi critici (Florence: Felice
le Monnier, 1930), pp. 192, 204–5.
18
See the discussion in Stefano Arcella, “L’epistolario Evola-Gentile: Tra Weltanschauung ’traditionale’ ed idealismo attualistico,” Futuro Presente 3, no. 6 (Spring 1995), pp.
79–88. For an account of Gentile’s influence, and that of Actualism, in the Fascist culture
of the period, see Gregor, Giovanni Gentile.
19
Rome: Atanor, 1928.
20
Julius Evola, “Fascismo antifilosofico e tradizione mediterranea,” Critica fascista, 5,
no. 12 (15 June 1929), pp. 227–29. Giuseppe Bottai, who as editor of Critica fascista, occasionally (seven times over twenty years) published essays by Evola, published them, he admitted, as an act of friendship. Bottai and Evola had served together in the Great War.
Bottai, as arbiter of Fascism as a doctrine, identified Evola’s notions as “an arbitrary coupling of a mass of ill-digested notions.” As cited in Mario Giovana, Le nuove camicie nere
(Turin: Edizione dell’Albero, 1966), p. 7.
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
197
ditional freedom” for those infused with cosmic wisdom and unlimited
power—thereby to capture the “rational essence” of “true liberalism.”21
The entirety of then contemporary politics was to be abjured. Evola
advocated the rejection of nationalism together with the secular state. He
deplored the violence of the squadristi, the armed militia of Fascism. He
condemned the “socialistoid” and “demogogic” character of Fascist corporativism. The only way Fascism could hope for deliverance was to be
infilled with the “calm illumination” of that true “Wisdom” arising out
of Mediterranean “hermetic and pythagorean silence”—finding confirmation of its “Truth” through “acts of power,” resonating with “vibrations in the blood,” rather than via the provision of pallid “arguments
and the writing of books.” Only if Fascism succeeded in finding its “light”
in the Bhagavad-gita might it be made truly revolutionary—to restore the
“traditional order of things”22 to a decadent modern world.
In all of this, little of Mussolini’s Fascism, other than some of its vocabulary, escaped unscathed. Almost four decades later, Evola was to repeat the
same roster of objections—and convey his conviction that Mussolini had
never been sufficiently “spiritual” to understand any of it.23 In effect, for
the youthful Evola, Fascism, as it was, had precious few immediate and
evident virtues. Early in 1925, his intention had been to convey all that by
undertaking efforts that were expressly anti-Fascist.24 He soon reconciled
himself to Fascism, however, apparently in order to employ it as a vehicle
to bring to its elite the “traditional wisdom” of his “invisible Masters”25—
in order that they might assist him in mounting a revolution against the
antitraditional decadence of the postmedieval “modern world.”
In retrospect, it appears evident that Evola was never particularly interested in Fascism, as such.26 In effect, he actually has no place in any history
of Fascist social and political thought. He is accorded a place because,
21
Evola, Imperialismo pagano, pp. 11–17 and part 3.
For Evola, the “traditional order of things” apparently ceased with the close of the Middle Ages; see Evola, La tradizione ermetica nei suoi simboli—nella sua dottrina—nella sua
“arte regia”, 2nd ed. (1931; Bari: Laterza, 1948, second edition of the 1931 volume), p. 24.
23
See Evola’s postwar critique of Fascism in his Il fascismo: Saggio di una analisi critica
dal punto di vista della Destra (Rome: Volpe, 1964), In his Il cammino del cinabro (Milan:
Al’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1963), pp. 96–97, he told his readership that Mussolini was not
sufficiently “spiritual” to understand “magic idealism.”
24
Marco Rossi, “Evola e la pubblicistica antifascista liberal-democratica: 1924–1925,”
Futuro presente 3. no. 6 (Spring 1995), p. 103.
25
Philippe Baillet, “I rapporti di Evola con il fascismo ed il nazionalsocialismo,” Futuro
presente 3, no. 6 (Spring 1995), p. 142. See Evola’s discussion of the “invisible masters” in
La tradizione ermetica, pp. 226–28.
26
In this context, see Hansen’s “Introduction,” in Evola, Men among The Ruins, pp. 1–
104. In the foreword to that same volume, Joscelyn Godwin correctly identified Evola as “a
fearless critic of the Fascist regime” (p. x).
22
198
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years after the passing of fascism, discussants have chosen to identify him
as the “fascist” source of the irrationalism and antihumanism of contemporary “extremism.” He presumably provided the meaning of fascism for
modern revolutionaries.
In fact, Evola was never a fascist, however the term is understood. He
provided idiosyncratic meaning for all its principal concepts in his candid
effort to further the interests of that arcane Tantric and Vedic Wisdom
that he had made his own.
With respect to Fascism, he advocated a total rejection of any notion
of a “totalitarian state” that rested on a nationalism that required obedience and commitment. Terms that had become familiar to Fascists, such
as “hierarchy,” “leadership,” “elitism,” the “state,” “imperialism,” and
“myth” all had their meanings transmogrified in the lexicon of Evola’s
“traditional Mediterranean vision.”27
Evola was the advocate of an anti–Roman Catholic pagan imperialism.28 The Roman Church was an obstacle to his purposes—and revolutionary responsibility cried out for the Church’s “subjugation.” According to his account, Christianity had destroyed the imperial
universality of the Roman Empire by insisting on the separation of the
secular and the spiritual. Out of that unnatural bifurcation arose all the
decadence of the modern world. Out of Christianity’s implacable opposition to the healthy paganism of the Mediterranean world arose the secularism, democracy, materialism, scientism, socialism, and the “subtle Bolshevism” that heralded the final age of the current cosmic cycle: the age
of “obscurity,” the kali-yuga.29
During 1927 and 1928, while Mussolini was negotiating his historic Concordat with the Papacy, Evola persisted in his public attacks
on the Church until they appeared to constitute a serious impediment to
improved Church-state relations. Giovanni Battista Montini, the
future Pope Paul VI, condemned Evola as a fevered anticlerical whose
obstructionist, anti-Catholic works were all but entirely devoid of meaning—but which were nonetheless creating Church-state tensions. Montini proceeded to lodge formal complaints against him with the Fascist
authorities.30
27
Evola, Imperialismo pagano, pp. 48–49.
Ibid., pt. 5, pp. 96–123.
29
Ibid., pp. 19–21.
30
Montini identified Evola as suffering from “those strange forms of cerebralism and
neurastenia, of intensive cultivation of incomprehensibility, of the metaphysic of obscurity,
of cryptology of expression, of pseudo-mystical precosity, of cabalistic fascinations magically evaporated by the refined drugs of Oriental erudition. ” As cited by Richard Drake,
“Julius Evola, Radical Fascism, and the Lateran Accords,” Catholic Historical Review, no.
74 (1988), p. 411.
28
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
199
In retrospect, it is clear that Mussolini allowed Evola to continue a
diversionary controversy with the Church in order to drive the Papacy
into the most accommodating arrangement he could. Mussolini recognized Evola as just that kind of anticlerical “hysterical fanatic”31 who
could best serve his purpose.32 And serve he did. Faced by the apparent
threat of a violent anticlerical “fascist” opposition, the Church concluded
its negotiations with Mussolini. With the Lateran Accords, the Church
agreed to a form of recognition that left it with a very distinctive sovereignty—a sovereignty that was, according to Mussolini, “neither sovereign nor free.”33 In part through his deft manipulation of Evola, Mussolini
had won what was perhaps his greatest single political success. As we
shall see, that was not to be the last time Mussolini was to press Evola
into service.
Irrespective of his contribution to Mussolini’s purpose, Evola was never
accorded any respect in Fascist intellectual circles. Almost every Fascist
intellectual of the period identified Evola as the author of “formless and
unsophisticated” polemics—the framer of works “every line” of which
“conceals a coarse error”—of publications that were not serious, meriting
only “to be put aside and thought no more about.”34
It is important to recognize that at the time of the writing of Imperialismo pagano, there is little evidence that Evola had any real interest in
race as an intellectual and political problem.35 Given those circumstances,
it cannot be said that anyone would have anticipated his interest in the
subject per se—or in Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism, when it later burst
upon the scene.36 Nonetheless, at about the time of Hitler’s accession to
31
See ibid., p. 414; and D. A. Binchy, Church and State in Fascist Italy (London: Oxford
University Press, 1941), p. 119.
32
The Church opposed the neo-Hegelian philosophy of Gentile’s Actualism as well, but
Mussolini’s treatment of Gentile was vastly different from that accorded Evola. Evola always remained marginal to Fascism. His prominence increased, as shall be argued, only
when Mussolini had some tactical use for him and his ideas.
33
Benito Mussolini, “Relazione alla Camera dei deputati sugli Accordi del Laterano,” in
Oo, vol. 24, p. 44.
34
Ugo d’Andrea, “Imperialismo pagano,” Critica fascista 6 (15 August 1928), pp. 319–
20; Luigi Volpicelli, “Imperialismo fascista,” Educazione fascista 6 (September 1928), p. 561.
35
There are some few and nonessential references to “race” as sangue (blood) and stirpe
(which can mean “race,” or “people”) throughout the text, but they are not really essential
to his argument.
36
Nor were major representatives of National Socialism particularly interested in Evola
except as a useful functionary for their purposes. They correctly perceived Evola as a representative of the “old aristocracy against the modern world.” He was considered a “reactionary” who was a “dilettante and pseudoscientific.” They further acknowledged that since
Evola had only been “tolerated and hardly supported by Fascism,” there was little reason
to “treat him seriously.” The report on “Baron Evola” is contained in a dossier maintained
200
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the chancellorship in Germany, when Fascist doctrine uniformly opposed
biological racism and anti-Semitism,37 Evola authorized a revised German
translation of Imperialismo pagano as Heidnischer Imperialismus38—
characterized by significant and portentous changes in the text.
In reading the German translation, one is immediately struck by the
excision from the text of almost any reference to Fascism. In fact, the term
disappears from the very title of the translation with the suppression of
the subtitle.39 All the subheadings within the text that contained the term
were altered. Almost the entire discussion concerning Fascism was suppressed. In the translation, Evola’s seeming concern with the prospects of
Fascism enjoyed none of the prominence it had in the original publication.
More important than the deletions is the reformulation of entire sections of the original argument—in order to introduce systematic and emphatic references to race and the theory of race. Along with all references
to Fascism, almost all mention of the “pagan Mediterranean tradition”
vanishes as well. What suddenly appears in the revised rendering is a distinguished place for recurrent allusions to an “Ur-Aryan” and “solar-Nordic” race. Evola argues that it is out of the creativity of that “blood” that
world culture emerges. Conversely, culture decline is a function of the
feckless mixture of Aryan, with lesser “animalistic,” blood—notions almost entirely absent from the original Italian edition.40
More significant, perhaps, is the emphatic appearance of an explicit
anti-Semitism in the translation. In the revised text, Evola considered
principled anti-Semitism one of the essentials of a salvific “racial rebirth”
in the modern world. Not only did Evola make a point of identifying
Karl Marx, one of the architects of the modern world of materialism,
inferiority, pretended equality, and cultural decay, as a Jew—but he
by the staff of Heinrich Himmler. As cited in H. T. Hansen’s “Introduction” to the English
translation of Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, Revolt against the Modern World (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995), p. xviii. Evola was convinced he could use National Socialism in order to rally support for his war against the “modern world.” See Elemire Zolla,
“The Evolution of Julius Evola’s Thought,” Gnosis, no. 14 (Winter 1990), pp. 18–20.
37
Bruno Brunello, a student of Gentile, in a review of a book on “Fascist racism,” identified German racism as a “most flagrant negation of historicistic immanentism.” Giornale
critico della filosofia italiana 18 (1937), pp. 202–5.
38
Leipzig: Armanen Verlag, 1933, trans. Friedrich Bauer.
39
The subtitle read: “Fascism Facing the Euro-Christian Threat.” Later, Evola spoke candidly of suppressing any discussion of Fascism in the translation. See Evola, Il cammino del
cinabro, p. 149.
40
Compare Evola, Heidnischer Imperialismus, pp. 1, 2–3, 5–7, 11, 12, 51–53. References to “blood” appear in the original Imperialismo pagano, but those references carry
little theoretical weight. Later, Evola referred to the changes in the German translation as a
response to “contingent” influences. See Evola, Il cammino del cinabro, p. 160.
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
201
spoke of a “Jewish capitalistic yoke” that obstructed every effort at racial regeneration.41
As a reflection of those changes, the entire section “The Preconditions
for Empire” was rewritten.42 According to the modified version, the “natural” and endogamous caste system of antiquity that sustained the “purity” of the culture-creating “Hyperborean Nordics” slowly disintegrated
over time under the corrosive influence of Semitic religion and the “Semitic spirit.” That spirit, incorporated in the Catholic Church, precipitated the decomposition of the true, hierarchical, and Leader- (Führer-)
dominated Roman, and Germano-Roman, empires. The Germanic leadership of the Holy Roman Empire resisted the “negative and Semitic”
sources of systemic decay throughout much of the Middle Ages with “a
spirit of freedom, independence and individuality—that found its origin
in the fundamental ethos of the original Germanic tribes.”43
The changes that occurred in the text of Evola’s Imperialismo pagano
in its translation as Heidnischer Imperialismus five years later were neither subtle nor unimportant. The core concepts that made up the substance of Evola’s thought remained substantially the same, but a number
of critical elements were introduced or modified that were to have serious
consequences. The “Mediterranean tradition” of the earlier text becomes,
more consistently, the “Nordic-solar tradition” in the translation.
“Aryan-German” and “Nordic-German” appear with insistent regularity
in the place of “Mediterranean.”
Evola’s shift of emphasis, together with the suppression of some, and
the modification as well as the introduction of other, concepts, transformed his Imperialismo pagano. It became, in part, a poor rationale for
National Socialist race theory. All the features that had made the work
non-, not to say anti-, Fascist in 1928 remained and were emphasized.
Nation, as a mobilizing myth, was abjured. Social concerns, the doctrinal
and juridical commitment to the syndicalist and corporativist organization of labor, was deplored. Populism was decried. Hierarchy and leadership, on any grounds other than mystic selection from “on high,” were
renounced as a perversity of the natural order of governance. While it was
clear that the core concepts of Evola’s “transrational” and transcendent
conception of the world had not significantly altered, it became manifestly
evident that his worldview had never been Fascist.
41
Heidnischer Imperialismus, pp. 11, 56, 59, 63. Whatever references are made to Jews
in the original version trace their origin back to Giovanni Preziosi, the anti-Semitic with
whom Evola had early established an intellectual relationship.
42
Compare the entire section “The Preconditions of Empire” in Imperialismo pagano
(pp. 18–35) with the same section in Heidnischer Imperialismus (pp. 14–18).
43
Evola, Heidnischer Imperialismus, p. 19.
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By the time of the translation of his Imperialismo pagano into German,
the overt form assumed by Evola’s “mysteriosophic” notions were superficially rendered compatible with at least some of the public formulations
of Hitler’s National Socialism. Very much the same might be said of Evola’s Rivolta contro il mondo moderno44—which appeared a year after the
German translation of Imperialismo pagano.
At the time he published his Imperialismo pagano, Evola exploited the
entire vocabulary of Fascism to cloak the features of his “Pythagorean”
and hermetic Wisdom. It was all part of his effort to reveal the “transhistorical Wisdom” of what Evola had originally identified as the “Homeric
and Hellenic . . . Mediterranean solar tradition” that in the German translation became the “Nordic- or Aryan-solar tradition.” Evola seemed prepared to employ whatever his environment made available in an effort to
convey the Wisdom of a “race of invisible and irresistible leaders” who,
as “demi-gods . . . outside of space and time” were capable of accomplishing all things.45 In his exaltation, it is clear that Evola considered neither
Mussolini’s Fascism nor Hitler’s National Socialism as “true.” They were
to be used as conveyances for his “higher” purposes.
By 1934, with both Imperialismo pagano and Heidnischer Imperialismus behind him, Evola devoted himself entirely to conveying an account of the “supernatural, invisible and intangible forces” of “primordial hyperborean Aryanism”—the “source of the principles of true life,”
employing concepts familiar to National Socialists but almost entirely
unknown to Mussolini’s Fascism.46 While he continued to employ the
solar symbols and the deities of old, the bearers of light were no longer
denizens of the Mediterranean. They had become generic “NordicAryans”—a stock of primordial “Hyperboreans”—cosmic representatives of that “metaphysical Reality” that sustained the world. The existence of Hyperborea (or Ultima Thule) was a “superrational” conviction
common among German mystics and occult racists certainly as early as
the turn of the twentieth century.47 It seems evident that Evola recognized
that the concepts he chose to employ in the German translation would be
familiar to his audience.
By the time he produced Rivolta contro il mondo moderno in 1934, all
of Evola’s culture creators had become, as descendents of Hyperboreans,
44
Milan: Hoepli, 1934.
Ibid., sec. 1.
46
See ibid., pp. 21, 45–46, 66–72, 88–94, 243–60, 407–25.
47
The range of German mysticism is reviewed in Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The
Morning of the Magicians (New York: Avon, 1968). While the Germans were responsive,
Evola complained that Rivolta contro il mondo moderno was entirely overlooked in Italy.
Whatever the case, the book had nothing whatsoever to do with Fascism. See Evola, Il
cammino del cinabro, p. 150.
45
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
203
generic “Aryans.”48 We are told that they originated, in primordial times,
in Hyperborea—that fabled land presumably located in the artic regions.
Over time, Evola informed his readers, the Hyperboreans migrated south,
to remain for some indeterminate time in Atlantis—yet another fabled
land—until its destruction prompted their further trek—in the course of
which they created all the grand cultures of North and South America—
including those of the Aztec and the Maya. In their migrations from east
to west, they fashioned the historical cultures of East and South Asia—
together with those of the Fertile Crescent and Egypt as well.49
By 1934, Evola was prepared to deliver himself of these accounts of
vast migrations and culture creation without the least hesitation. He was
distainful of the objections raised by “positivistic” historians—who insisted on physical “confirming evidence” for any of his omnibus claims.
In fact, he was proud to reject the methodology of “modern” inquiry.50
He was fond of repeating Laotze: “He who possesses the Truth does not
discuss it; he who discusses it, does not possess it.”51 A sympathetic commentator characterizes the historiography of Evola’s “Secret Wisdom” in
the following fashion: “We must, for once, turn off the continual din of
reason and listen with the ‘ear of the heart’ if we want to have the symbols
strike responsive chords in ourselves.” What we presumably have in Evola’s account is “a timeless world lying beyond reason, prehistorical, and
beyond history.”52 For Evola, “Truth” had an exclusively “celestial” origin and any demand for historical evidence or logical validation was not
only profane and plebeian, but blasphemous as well.
Evola was convinced that there was nothing that could count as “objective” science. What there was, was a traditional “Wisdom,” “superrational, superbiological and superindividual,” infinitely superior to anything generated by empirical science—having nothing to do with the
“mundane intellect and still less with the thin world of ‘thinkers.’ ”53 He
argued that not only were all contemporary sciences predicated on sys48
He regularly reminded his readers that the term “Aryan” had clear racial connotations.
See, for example, Julius Evola, La dottrina del risveglio (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1942), p. 23,
n. 2.
49
Evola, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, pt. 2, chaps. 4 and 5; and Sintesi di dottrina
della razza (Milan: Hoepli, 1941), pp. 70–77. Chinese civilization may have originated
among the Nordic-Aryan race as well. Evola cites the discovery of blonds among the earliest
human remains in China. See Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, pp. 304–5.
50
See the discussion in Titus Burckhardt, Mirror of the Intellect: Essays on Traditional
Science and Sacred Art (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 68–74.
51
Evola, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, p. 9, n. 7.
52
H. T. Hansen, Foreword to Evola, The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols and Teachings of
the Royal Art (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995), p. xii.
53
Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza, p. 46.
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tematic “materialistic”54 presuppositions, with the individual sciences
each based on fundamentally different assumptions, and therefore intrinsicably incommensurable, but he also held that there was “Hebraic” as
distinct from “Aryan-Nordic” science.55 Anyone who did not intuitively
understand that was hopelessly and irretrievably impaired.56 If there had
ever been anything of Fascism in the thought of Evola, it had long since
disappeared into the mists of “transrational Wisdom.”
Evola’s “supreme Wisdom” found expression in, and was exclusively
recoverable through, those myths and symbols that positive science was
content to treat only as primitive fantasies and distortions of half-remembered events. For Evola, myths and symbols contained the ineffable truths
of human and superhuman history—revelatory of the most profound realities. Only if one were infilled with the proper physical and spiritual racial
heritage—been initiated into the mysteries of “supernatural” and “supercorporeal” reality, and been suitably trained in esoteric ritual and ceremony—might one become privy to the most profound Truths of Evolian
metaphysics.57
Evola’s definitive statement of the racism that first found expression in
his Rivolta contro il mondo moderno was fully articulated in his Sintesi
di dottrina della razza that appeared seven years later, in 1941, and four
years after the publication of his Il mito del sangue.58 In that latter work,
he provided a more or less synoptic rendering of the works of race theorists such as Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, H. S. Chamberlain, Georges
Vacher de Lapouge, Ludwig Woltmann, and Hans F. K. Günther—to conclude with an entirely uncritical chapter on the racial notions of Adolf
Hitler.59 Evola treated all these individuals as dealing with a “materialistic,” and hence entirely inadequate, inquiry into “truth.”
The volume that followed in 1941, Sintesi di dottrina della razza, provides Evola’s account of a theory of race he held to be both credible and
revolutionary. It contained his views on “spiritual racism” and cosmic
philosophy. Whatever else it was, it was a book that was neither Fascist
54
Ibid., p. 45.
Julius Evola, “Andare avanti sul fronte razzista,” La difesa della razza 4, no. 8 (20
February 1941), p. 19, and “Panorama razziale dell’Italia preromana,” La difesa della razza
4, no 16 (20 June 1941), p. 9, reprinted in La razze e il mito delle origini di Roma (Monfalcone: Sentinella d’Italia, 1977).
56
Evola, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, pp. 7–12.
57
Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza, pp. 148–50.
58
Milan: Hoepli, 1937. That it was more “orthodox” than other of his works does not
mean that Il mito del sangue did not contain a long exposition of Hyperborea and the
“primordial Nordic-Aryan race.” See chap. 7. It also contains suggestions concerning an
“occult war” conducted by Jews against the modern Aryan nations. See chap. 9.
59
Evola considered his exposition as entirely descriptive, serving his audience as an “objective” source of information.See Evola, Il mito del sangue, pp. 263–64.
55
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
205
nor National Socialist. Evola was a “believer” in neither.60 For his own
purposes, Evola used the book to introduce his views into both Fascist
and National Socialist doctrine. In 1941, he was prepared to use, to the
same ends, the views of Carl Schmitt—which had been insinuated into
Italy via the increasingly intense discussions that collected around the concept “imperialism.”
Schmitt’s views, in general, were moderate. Evola used the occasion of
the discussions initiated by Schmitt to attempt to envelop Fascist doctrine
in a kind of mystical anti-intellectualism it had previously scant acknowledged. As has been indicated, Evola consistently imagined truth to be
a “celestial and supermundane” product made available to humankind
through a “superior and transcendent Tradition” embodied in myth and
symbol, to be interpreted by initiates sensitized by occult ritual. He told
his audience that initiatic science revealed the truth of racism to be superbiological, nondeterministic, and supernatural. He insisted that any subordinate truths that dealt with race as physical, were far from the
“Truths” with which he was concerned. Such “material” or “positivistic”
truths dealt with race in terms of inferior “natural” anthropological and
genetic factors. It was that form of racism Evola disdained. He chose,
rather, to point to “higher” forms: racism of the soul, and racism of the
spirit. The “Truths” of that complex racism could be provided only by
“Transcendent Wisdom.” Privileged by his special access to the “Silent
Wisdom of Tradition,” Evola proceeded to outline the principal features
of his comprehensive racism in his Sintesi di dottrina della razza.
The racism for which Evola made himself virtually the sole spokesman
was a racism composed of special insights into human beings. Evola saw
the human being as a complex entity composed of three elements: first,
the corporeal body; the second, what Evola spoke of as the “racial soul”;
and third, that of the “racial spirit.”
Physical race corresponded, by and large, to that studied by physical
anthropologists, biologists, and geneticists. Evola held their findings to
be of meager interest and even less merit. The physical study of race was
afflicted with all the cognitive impairments Evola attributed to modern
empirical science. Anthropologists, biologists, and geneticists dealt with
race as though races were “natural” phenomena. Worse still, modern ma60
National Socialist authorities recognized as much. Evola was dismissed as a simple
“anti-revolutionary reactionary” who identified himself with the “decadent nobility.” SS
officials saw no point in assisting him in any way, particularly because “Fascist officials
rejected him.” See Giorgio Galli, “Evola e la Germania national-socialista,” in Mario Bernardi Guardi and Marco Rossi, eds., Delle rovine e oltre (Roma: Antonio Pellicani Editore,
1995), pp. 199–217.
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terialists, Darwinists all, imagined that mankind had evolved from lower
forms of life. All of which Evola held to be profoundly mistaken.61
Evola was prepared to concede that there was, in fact, hereditary transmission of certain physical properties that established the continuity of
races (however defined by anthropologists). Such properties, however,
were of peripheral importance and served largely as limiting conditions
for the terrestrial activity of “spiritual races.”
Whatever relationship they had with the material world, spiritual races
had superterrestrial and transtemporal origins. The principal function of
the material races, the races studied by physical anthropologists and geneticists, was to provide a medium through which the “superbiological”
spiritual forces of the “transcendent” race would find expression. Equally
clear was the conviction that only specific material races could serve in
such capacity. Those were the races identified as “Aryan”—non-Jewish
and apparently of “Hyperborean” extraction. Evola spoke of “Aryans”
as “all the major indoeuropean races that shared a common Hyperborean
element that traced its prehistoric origins to the Artic regions of the
North.”62 Evola was convinced of the Hyperborean origins of most Europeans, the indigenous peoples of North and South America, as well as
those of the Indian subcontinent—making it exceedingly difficult to identify his potential Aryan host races with any specificity.63
61
Ibid., pp. 44–47, 51, 64, 92.
Julius Evola, “Dell’Italia preromana,” Difesa della razza 4, no. 16 (20 June 1941), p.
9. He specifically maintains “grave reservations” concerning the meaning attributed to the
term “Aryan” in “certain modern racist ideologies.” See Evola, Rivolta contro il mondo
moderno, p. 302, n. 1.
63
Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, pp. 81, 75. It is impossible to trace many of the
citations to the English translation of the Rivolta contro il mondo moderno. In the English
translation, some of the edge of Evola’s racism is blunted. For example, on page 36 of Revolt
against the Modern World (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 1995) there is
simply talk of “pre-Aryan races” rather than “the black non-Aryan race” as it is found in
the original Italian version (Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, p. 59). Similar instances
recur throughout the translation. Instead of “the Nordic-Atlantic race” in the Italian edition
(p. 252), for instance, we find “races of the second cycle” in the English translation (p. 195).
“Nordic-Heroic” in the Italian (p. 344) becomes “heroic Aryan-Western” in English (p.
264) and the “Nordic-Aryan” becomes simply “Aryan.” The “pure Aryan race” referred to
in the Italian edition as originally of “Nordic stock” (p. 253) becomes a “first major group”
in English (p. 197). None of these changes conceal the fundamentally racist character of the
text, of course, but there seems to be a tendency to suppress its “Nordic” emphasis—as
perhaps too reminiscent of National Socialism. (Compare, for example, pages 230 and 231
in the English to pages 302 and 303 in the Italian.) While Evola was clear about the relative
insignificance of the physical attributes of race, he did acknowledge that the “original Hyperboreans,” with which he was critically concerned, were probably “dolicocephalic (longheaded), tall and slender, blond, and blue-eyed.” (Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza, p.
67). He seemed to identify them with the “pure Nordics” of National Socialist doctrine. In
what seems to be a further attempt to dilute the racism, there is an alteration of the Italian
62
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
207
Evola held that the physical mixture of races, particularly between
Aryans and races that were “alien” (i.e., non-Aryan), was always hazardous—but mixture between “related” races, under ill-defined circumstances, might produce hybrid vigor.64 Given his generous notion of what
constituted an Aryan race, those candidate races Evola considered to be
truly “alien” were never really explicity cataloged—except in terms of
Semites (although that proscription seems to have been restricted specifically to Jews) and the deeply pigmented peoples of sub-Saharan Africa.65
What seemed eminently clear, for all the qualifiers, was that all the
material races that Evola identified as capable of serving as hosts for the
extrabiological and supernatural spiritual elements were purportedly biological descendants of the “Aryan-Nordics” of Hyperborea. Some of the
Aryan peoples seem to have somehow become increasingly pigmented in
the course of their migrations—distinguishing them from contemporary
Nordics—but that was only incidental to Evola’s account. Rather than
their physical traits, he was more concerned with their properties of soul
and of spirit.
Evola’s discussion of the racial soul followed the account provided by
the German writer Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, author of a number of
books on what Clauss variously called “racial character” or “racial
soul.”66 Clauss’s studies were “empirical” in the sense that they were
text where Evola speaks of the Jews as bearers of “a ferment of decomposition” (p. 314)—
an Hitlerian phrase familiar to National Socialists. It appears in much milder form in the
English translation (p. 242). In the Italian, Evola charges Jews with fostering anti-Traditional ideologies (p. 421 and n. 9)—all of which seems to disappear in the English version
(p.324). A review by Ugoberto Alfassio Grimaldi di Bellino, “Ai margini di una polemica
sulla validità di un esoterismo razzista,” of Evola’s work in Civiltà fascista 9, no. 10 (August
1942), pp. 647–52, excoriated Evola and his work, dismissing it as “pseudoscience,” at
best, and intrinsically anti-Fascist (see p. 652).
64
Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza, p. 85.
65
See Evola, “Psicologia criminale ebraica,” Difesa della razza 2, no. 18 (20 July 1939),
pp. 32–35. His specific objection to African Blacks is expressed in many places, but see, for
example, Sintesi di dottrina della razza, pp. 74, 237. At times, Evola seemed to indicate,
with qualifications as indicated, that “true Aryans” were blond, dolicocephalic, slender and
tall—what National Socialist theorists identified as “Nordics.” See Sintesi di dottrina della
razza, pp. 67, 140–41. How different Evola’s views on race were from those of other Fascist
thinkers is made evident by statements that characterize many of them. In 1938, for example, in the same volume of Difesa della razza in which the Fascist “Racial Manifesto” appeared, Quinto Flavio could write, “Every people, every racial type, is, in one or another
respect, a masterwork of creation, and can consider itself a chosen people. . . . The notion
of election becomes . . . absurd and inhuman when it pretends to an absolute character. . . .
It takes on the character of megalomania and makes little ethical sense.” “Il razzismo e la
pace,” Difesa della razza 1, no. 3 (5 September 1938), p. 38.
66
Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss, Rasse und Seele: Eine Einführung in den Sinn der leiblichen
Gestalt (Berlin: Gutenberg, 1937); and Rasse und Charakter (Frankfurt am Main: Moritz
Diesterweg, 1938).
208
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based on some sort of systematic observation. He selected persons possessed of reasonably specific somatic racial traits and observed their behaviors in order to typify the various racial “souls” those behaviors exemplified.67 Thus, in Clauss’s judgment, Nordic man is driven by a racial
necessity to “achieve,” while Mediterraneans, not particularly serious,
are dispositionally “histrionic.” For Clauss these were the discernible
properties of “soul (Seele)” to which Evola refers.
To carry the account further, Evola argued that in unmixed types, the
“racial soul” somehow conforms to the overt somatotype. In some racial
mixtures, however, the body and soul are disparate, incompatible. Thus,
a “physical” Nordic may harbor a Mediterranean, or even a Hebrew,
“soul.”68 Individuals of this kind, however much they may physically resemble their parent race, fail to comprehend, or be comprehended by,
members of that parent community. “A boundary separates their souls,
their manner of sensing and seeing is different and opposed to those who
may share their outward racial traits. There exists the possibility of comprehension, and therefore of real solidarity, of profound unity, only where
there exists a common ‘race soul.’ ”69 Thus, Jews, no matter how long
resident in Italy, would still manifest those differences of soul that render
them truly corrosive of the unity of the non-Jewish community.70
Evola explained that the “racial soul” was not that studied by modern
psychology. Rather, Traditional Wisdom informs those who are adepts
that the racial soul, identified as a daemon by the Ancients, is an entity in
and of itself—a “subtle body, having its own proper existence, its own
forces, its own laws, and its own heredity, distinct from those that are
physiobiological.”71 Precisely how such an independent soul—which survives the material body at its death—worked together with the flesh was
unclear, and Evola spent little time trying to relieve the obscurity. Those
who possessed the “transcorporeal” properties necessary for full comprehension would duly understand.
Evola dismissed the notion that the study of the racial soul could be
an empirical physiobiological or psychological inquiry. True knowledge
could come only from the wisdom “adumbrated” in the cryptic myths,
evanescent symbols, and obscure rituals we inherited from Hyperborean
antiquity. Beyond the racial “soul,” the “primordial Sacred Science” pro67
See Clauss’s discussion in Rasse und Seele, pt. 2.
Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza, pp. 79–80, 119.
69
Ibid., p. 119.
70
See Evola, “Inquadramento del problema ebraico,” La vita italiana 25, no. 293 (September 1937), pp. 266–72; and “Ebraismo distruttivo: Scienza, letteratura, musica,” La vita
italiana 26, 301 (April 1938), pp. 440–52.
71
Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza, pp. 116, 118–19, 120.
68
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
209
vided insights into the “spirit” that, beyond body and soul, animated the
races of humankind.72 Beyond the body and soul of modern races, Evola
addressed himself to what he considered its most important component:
the transcendent cosmic spirit that infuses each individual at birth.
If Evola’s treatment of the racial soul leaves one uncertain, his account of “racial spirit” seems even more opaque. Of the trinity of elements that make up the human being, the spirit is apparently an aspect
of an eternal race that lives its eternal life in cycles.73 In Evola’s account,
each such racial cycle has four “ages” or “epochs”: golden, silver,
bronze, and iron, each defined by virtue of the increasing degeneration
of the initial “celestial race.”74
In the golden age, the celestial race was spiritual—only gradually, over
time, taking on material properties. The original celestials could command all the tangible and intangible forces of the cosmos—and left behind, as evidences of their presence, gigantic megalithic and pyramidal
structures, which are still to be seen in Europe, in Egypt, on Easter Island,
and in the high plateaus of South America. Where others have since discerned evidences of the “gods,” traveling in flying saucers from distant
galaxies to Earth, Evola perceives the faint footprints of the unadulterated
celestial “super race.”
At least part of the reason for the decline of that race was its mating
with lesser creatures,75 the fossils of which are produced by “positivistic”
scientists in their efforts to establish the credibility of human ascent from
lower forms of life.76 Evola employs the fossils of primate humanoids to
support his claims of the misalliance of the celestial race with those of
lesser “animalistic” breed.
As a necessary consequence of miscegenation, there was a continual
and irreversible decline of the celestials throughout ancient times,77 a tenuous revival under the Romans, and another by the Nordic-Germans during the course of the Holy Roman Empire—but by the time of the Renaissance, with its humanism, rationalism, universalism and its gradual
submission to the theses of the equality of all humans, humankind had
reached kali-yuga, the terminal age of “obscurity,” the end of this current
72
See Evola, La tradizione ermetica, pp. 1–3.
Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza, p. 153.
74
See the discussion in Evola, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, pt. 2, chaps. 1–7.
75
See ibid., p. 285. Since the four ages followed the cosmic “laws” of dharma, it would
seem that decline was fated, so that mismating could have only been the mechanism that
produced the predetermined result.
76
Ibid., pp. 233–37.
77
Evola identifies the Jews as providing a “ferment of decomposition, dissolution and
corruption” in antiquity; see Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza p. 160; Rivolta contro il
mondo moderno, p. 314.
73
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race cycle. For Evola, given the fateful path traversed by history, there
remained only one course for contemporary humanity: an attempt at reconstitution of the primordial celestial race, amid the debris of previous
race cycles, employing the racial remnants of the Hyperboreans.
While Evola was not sanguine concerning the prospects of that undertaking, he argued that some of the prevailing conditions might well foster
such an outcome. First of all, he was convinced that the cosmic spirit
governing the fate of races, under present world conditions, might well
contribute to the enterprise.
Evola was prepared to accept some of the conclusions of the “positive”
science of genetics, acknowledging the influence of the “materialistic”
laws governing the Mendelian transmission of hereditary traits from parents to subsequent filial generations, but he was to make an emphatic
point of what he called “idiovariations”—unpredictable genetic mutations in hereditary transmission between generations—to make a case for
the influence, from “on high,”78 of “superbiological” and “spiritual”
forces in the shaping of races. For Evola, spiritual forces shaped races for
their own inscrutable purposes.79
Geneticists, Evola argued, failed to provide a compelling account of
how mutations occur. He maintained, as a consequence, that “the cause
is to be found elsewhere, in the actions of a superbiological element not
reducible to the determinism of the physical transmission of genetic materials.” The true cause of hereditary variation was to be found “rather by
starting from another point of view that affords one an entirely different
set of laws” than those of empirical science.80
Given that entirely unsupported supposition, Evola proceeded to argue
that Fascism or National Socialism—with their heroism, their sacrificial
and ascetic ethic, their authoritarian and hierarchical order, together with
their appeal to myth and ritual—provided an environment compatible
with the “spirit” of the celestials. That might be enough to prompt a
cosmic, if gradual, reemergence of the celestial race. In such circumstances, the formative spiritual principle that, in the ultimate analysis,
governs the transcendent “superhistory” of humankind might literally reconstitute the individuals of the primordial creative race of Hyperborea.
Evola sought to show that such an outcome would not be essentially de78
See Evola, “La razza e la guerra: La concezione Ariana del combattere,” La difesa della
razza 3, no. 4 (20 December 1939), p. 34.
79
The notion that mutations, governed from “on high,” might be the source of raciation
was a relatively common conviction among German esoterics. See Pauwels and Bergier, The
Morning of the Magicians, pp. 400–5.
80
Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza, p. 79; see pp. 77–79, and Evola, “Critica della
teoria dell’eredità,” Regime fascista, 13 December 1934, reprinted in Diorama: Problemi
dello spirito nell’etica fascista (Rome: Europa, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 191–96.
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
211
termined by biology, but by the cosmic spirit —that its formative influence
could transform individuals into persons accommodating a properly corresponding soul and spirit—to render them once again “pure.”81 None of
this has anything to do with Fascism as a doctrine—except as a caricature.
In general, this was the “racial theory” Mussolini purportedly read,
and of which he is said to have approved.82 If there ever was such an
approval, it clearly was significantly qualified. There is no doubt whatsoever that Mussolini, for a variety of reasons, objected to National Socialist
race theory—and Evola’s original statements, as early as 1935, expressed
explicit opposition to its “materialism.”83 It was in that limited and specific sense that Mussolini, given that he had long since raised emphatic
objections to what he identified at the time as “pan-Germanic racism,”84
welcomed Evola’s book.
It was evident that Mussolini had no intention of allowing National
Socialist race theories, as such, to find a place in Fascist doctrine. Mussolini never identified Fascism with National Socialist racial theories—and
Evola’s book (apparently one of the very few of Evola’s publications he
had apparently read) served his purposes. To effectively serve that end,
Mussolini permitted the publication of a translation of the Sintesi to appear in Germany with the title Fundamentals of Fascist Race Theory,85 in
what was clearly an effort to indicate that Fascism had its own distinctive
views concerning the race issue—and they bore scant resemblance to
those notions found in National Socialism. Within the covers of an easily
available single publication, it would demonstrate to National Socialists
that their preoccupations concerning Aryanism and anti-Semitism were
being addressed by Fascism. Evola’s pages were dotted with references to
both issues—something that was not true of standard Fascist discussions
of race.
By the mid-1930s, Fascist intellectuals had already articulated coherent
and sophisticated conceptions of raciation and human evolution that
many were prepared to identify as a “Fascist racial doctrine.”86 The formulations included a thesis of race formation that conceived endogamous
81
Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza, p. 82.
See the discussion in Evola, il cammino del cinabro, pp. 160–74 and the quotation
reported in Gianfranco de Turris, Omaggio a Julius Evola (Rome: Volpe, 1973), p. 76.
83
In the Sintesi di dottrina della razza (p. 17), Evola explicitly abjures “materialistic”
racism, identifying it with “certain extremist racist tendencies from beyond the Alps.”
84
See the section entitled “Il pangermanismo teorico,” in Il Trentino veduto da un socialista (note e notizie), in Mussolini, Oo, vol. 33. pp. 157–61.
85
Evola, Grundrisse des Faschistichen Rassenlehre, trans. by Annamarie Rasch (Berlin:
Runge, 1943).
86
See, for example, Giacomo Acerbo, Fondamenti della dottrina fascista della razza
(Rome: Ministry of Popular Culture, 1940).
82
212
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groups gradually taking on relatively uniform physical and perhaps psychological characteristics that would identify them as “neo-” or “mesodiacritic” races—as “races in formation.” Such races in formation could be
found, at various stages of development, in any community maintaining
relatively strict endogamy over long periods of time. Geographically or
politically isolated communities such as tribes, city-states, confederations,
or nations might serve as just such “race-cradles.” The group-building
psychology—which Fascist thinkers identified with nationalism—would
foster the entire, complex workings of population genetics that rendered
endogamous communities “races in formation.”87 The entire conceptual
framework that gave expression to what might legitimately be identified
as “Fascist race theory” involved a process that had been early suggested
by the generalizations of “protofascist” social scientists such as Ludwig
Gumplowicz, Alfredo Niceforo, and Vilfredo Pareto.88 In the years that
followed, Fascist intellectuals built upon that foundation.
What “orthodox” Fascist race theory did not include were speculations
concerning racial superiority and inferiority—nor did it characteristically
include anti-Semitism—features prominent in Evola’s work. Those were
the features—not their mystical rationale—that made Evola’s work eminently serviceable for Mussolini’s political purposes.
The fact is that at the time of the publication of Evola’s Sintesi, the
most serious students of raciation and comparative psychology in Fascist
Italy dismissed his ideas as “bizarre . . . occult anti-scientific fantasies.”89
Evola had early been identified by Fascist critics as a “lucid madman,”
who was not to be taken seriously. Even granted his tactical utility, it is
difficult to entirely understand Mussolini’s readiness to allow the publication of Evola’s book in National Socialist Germany as a rendering of “Fascist” doctrine.90
Mussolini had a fairly sophisticated conception of science and epistemology. In the mid-1930s, he said, “If one understands by ‘mysticism’ the
ability to apprehend truths independent of intelligence, I would be the
first to declare my opposition.”91 He was clearly convinced that human
87
For a more complete account of the orthodox version of Fascist race theory, see Gregor,
The Ideology of Fascism, chap. 6.
88
See ibid., chap. 2.
89
Mario F. Canella, Principi di psicologia razziale (Florence: Sansoni, 1941), pp. 59, 61,
n. 1, 203, n. 2. See the similar, but more intense criticism in the official Fascist monthly,
Civiltà fascista 9, no. 10 (August 1942), pp. 647–52.
90
For a more nuanced view of Evola’s relationship with Mussolini, see Marco Rossi,
“L’avanguardia che si fa tradizione: L’itinerario culturale di Julius Evola dal primo dopoguerra alla metà degli anni Trenta,” in Guardi and Rossi, Delle rovine e oltre, pp. 37–120.
91
Mussolini, as quoted in Yvon de Begnac, Palazzo Venezia: Storia di un regime (Rome:
La Rocca, 1950), p. 186. Emphasis supplied.
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
213
beings, possessed of limited capabilities, found themselves compelled to
labor assiduously to meet the most “rigorous of scientific and rational
criteria” in their pursuit of truth.92 There was, in fact, very little that could
qualify as “mystical” or “transintellectual” in his political thought.93 To
say that he found something other than tactical utility in invoking Evola’s
work is most implausible.
It is evident that Mussolini was convinced that for the vast majority
of those subject to rule, ritual affirmations, symbolic speech, mobilizing
myths, and hyperbole served an evident and useful purpose. To foster
and sustain conviction, inspire enterprise, and motivate effort, omnibus
injunctions and dramatic exaggerations might well serve.94 All that was
recommended not because of mystic inspiration from “on high,” but as
a consequence of perfectly rational calculation.
It is clear, therefore, that Mussolini would not be averse to using “mystic musings” to foster political ends—without himself subscribing to mysticism. The problem then becomes one of attempting to determine what
possible Fascist ends might be served by the official or semiofficial publication, with whatever qualifications, of the works of Evola.
The “orthodox” theory of race that had become a functional part of
Fascist nationalism had simply accommodated itself to doctrine as doctrine developed in Italy through the late 1920s and early 1930s. By the
mid-1930s, Mussolini was convinced that Fascism, as the senior of the
two revolutionary movements that had appeared in Western Europe after
the First World War, was required to take a position on the specific issue
of race that had come to preoccupy all of Europe at the time. But more
than that, the increasing interaction of German and Italian political, military, and intellectual representatives generated a number of problems that
complicated the entire issue.
What Mussolini needed, as the military and political alliance between
Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany became more and more intimate, was an account of how Fascism dealt with the race issue that might
placate Hitler and his followers. Mussolini was always mildly contemptuous of National Socialist race theory. He mocked all of its intellectual
92
As cited ibid., p. 644.
The “anti-intellectualism” of Fascism is generally misunderstood. See Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, chap. 3; and Gregor, Ideology of Fascism, chap. 5.
94
See, for example, Mussolini’s comments in de Begnac, Palazzo Venezia, p. 652; and
Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini, pp. 119–20, 125. Roberto Michels gave a perfectly rational account of Fascist myth and invocation. See Roberto Michels, First Lectures in Political
Sociology (New York: Harper, 1949), chaps. 6 and 8; and “Psychologie der antikapitalistische Massenbewegungen,” in Grundriss der Sozialökonomik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1926),
pt. 7; and Gregor, Phoenix, chaps. 3 and 4.
93
214
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sources and insisted that a healthy nationalism had no need for the “delirium of racism” that afflicted his German counterparts beyond the Alps.95
By 1938, however, Mussolini sought to reduce any distance that separated him from his National Socialist allies.96 Convinced since the very
foundations of his movement that the “plutocracies”97 would never allow
Italy its sought-for “place in the sun,” and given Italy’s meager military
capabilities, Mussolini believed that he had no option but to follow Germany into a conflict that he hoped would be of very short duration.98
Under the circumstances, it became critical to reduce the ideological distance between the two regimes. Fascist race theory would have to speak
to the issues of Aryans and Jews—something, until that time, that standard race theory in Mussolini’s Italy did not do. Mussolini, by overtly
addressing issues that were central to National Socialist thought, sought
to have Hitler’s Germany take Fascist Italy more seriously.99 That would
serve Fascism’s immediate and general purposes.
As has been suggested, prior to 1938, Fascist criticism of National Socialist race theory was all but universal. As late as 1932, Mussolini himself
dismissed National Socialist race theory as “hysterical.” He was fully
aware of the implications of Hitler’s race theories: “they tended more or
less explicitly to underline the superiority of the German race with respect
to all the other races—including the Italian.”100
As Italy moved closer and closer to military alliance with National Socialist Germany, the importance of an accommodating race theory increased in significance. In mid-1938, the “Manifesto of Fascist Racism”101
was formally issued and was calculated to address all the tensions the
alliance with a racist National Socialism had provoked. In itself, the Man95
Mussolini, in Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini, pp. 71–72.
See Andrew M. Canepa, “Mussolini’s Racist Politics: Half-Hearted Cynicism,” Patterns of Prejudice 13, no. 6 (November–December 1979), pp. 18–27.
97
In 1919, Mussolini identified the “plutocracies” as England, France, and the United
States. See Mussolini, “Il discorso,” in Oo, vol. 14, pp. 30–31.
98
See the account in De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Lo Stato totalitario, 1936–1940 (Turin:
Einaudi, 1996), note pp. 286–88.
99
It is also recognized that, at the same time, Mussolini felt that some sort of racial
legislation should be invoked in order to stop Italians from consorting with the native population of Ethiopia. Mussolini was convinced that such relations between Italians and the
indigenous population would undermine the political security of Italian rule. The consequence was antimiscegenation legislation, which contributed to the evolving pro-racist intellectual environment. See the comments in Ciano, Ciano’s Hidden Diary, 1937–1938, pp.
62, 141, and De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, pp. 237–38, n. l.
100
S. de Martino indicated that some ill-informed Italian intellectuals sought to “construct the Italian doctrine of race on the anti-Roman principles of Nordicists. ” Salvatore
de Martino, Lo spirito e la razza (Rome: Signorelli, 1940), p. 183; and Renzo De Felice,
Mussolini il duce, p. 595.
101
A translation is available in Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism, app. A, pp. 383–86.
96
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
215
ifesto was a relatively inoffensive document, apparently largely the work
of Mussolini himself.102
Long before political concerns prompted the official issuance of a peculiar sort of racial doctrine, Mussolini had used the characterization
“Aryan” to identify Italians—and had often spoken of Italians as a “race”
(stirpe), frequently using the terms “race” and “nation” interchangeably.103 All of that was commonplace among intellectuals during the first
four decades of the twentieth century. As had been indicated, what was
notably absent from Mussolini’s writings and speeches were expressions
of “Aryan” racial superiority and ideological anti-Semitism.104 Early in
the history of Fascism, he asserted that “Italy has never known anti-Semitism, and I believe it never will.”105
As has been indicated, until the middle of the 1930s, Mussolini rejected
any form of official anti-Semitism. In fact, he advised Hitler to minimize
his overt anti-Semitism on the grounds that it would create unnecessary
repugnance on the part of foreign powers. Only with Hitler’s refusal, and
after the political and military circumstances of the late 1930s left Italy,
in his judgment, no alternative but alliance with National Socialist Germany, did he decide to render the alliance “totalitarian” by adopting his
own variant of official anti-Semitism.
The official “Manifesto of Fascist Racism” abjured any a priori distinctions of superiority and inferiority between races.106 It spoke of major and
minor races, geographic and local, each sharing some nonspecific constellation of heritable traits. While making clear distinctions between nationality
and race, it did speak of an “Italian race”—alluding to an “historic race,”
102
See Ciano, Ciano’s Hidden Diary, 1937–1938, p. 136.
See the interesting discussion “Genesi del razzismo fascista,” in Enzo Leoni, Mistica
del razzismo fascista (Varese: Tipografia Varese, 1941), pp. 19–27.
104
Clearly, Mussolini touted the creativity of the “Italian race,” but there is literally no
evidence that he conceived that creativity to be biologically or genetically based. Mussolini,
like Josef Stalin, entertained a form of vulgar anti-Semitism in private (see, for example, his
comments in Ciano, Ciano’s Hidden Diary, 1937–1938, pp. 9, 47, 75). The public antiSemitic legislation he ultimately allowed after 1938 was to be used to “discriminate, not
persecute.” (See p. 137). Early in the regime, long before the alliance with National Socialist
Germany, Mussolini spoke of “the great Jewish bankers,” and their control of “world finance”—power they employed in supporting the rise of communism in an effort to exact
“revenge against the Aryan race.” (See Mussolini, “I complici,” in Oo, vol. 13, pp. 169–
70). A year later, however, Mussolini made it clear that he was convinced that “Bolshevism,
as it is thought, is not a Jewish phenomenon” (Mussolini, “Ebrei, Bolshevismo, e Sionismo
Italiano,” in Oo, vol. 15, p. 269). During the last six hundred days of the Republic of Salò,
he made references to the perfidy of Jews. Whatever the case, the notion that he ever considered their mass immolation can be confidently dismissed.
105
Mussolini, “Ebrei, Bolscevismo e Sionismo Italiano,” in Oo, vol. 15, p. 270.
106
This was a position consistently held by Mussolini since his tenure, as a socialist, in
Austria-Hungary before the First World War.
103
216
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the product of a relatively long period of endogamy among members of a
politically defined population on the Italic peninsula.107
The closing claims of the Manifesto were more clearly tactically political than scientific.108 There was talk of “sharp distinctions” between Continental “Mediterraneans” and “Eastern and African Mediterraneans,”
with Italians entertaining an “Aryan-Nordic orientation” in order to foster a “normative ideal” indisputably “European.”109 The Jews were spoken of as unassimilable—and intermarriage between Jews and “Aryans,”
as well as between members of “non-European races” and “Aryans,”
were proscribed. Corresponding discriminatory legislation followed.110
It became evident almost immediately to the Fascist hierarchy that Italians, apparently in their majority, were uncomfortable with the new legislation.111 Many Fascist intellectuals, represented at their best by Giovanni
Gentile, found the legislation morally objectionable.112
However serviceable the anti-Semitic legislation may have been for
Mussolini’s tactical purposes, it was undertaken with bad conscience. It
involved regulations manifestly different from those of National Socialist
Germany. It was, for one thing, “more moderate and ‘civil,’ ” allowing
those Jews who had served in the Italian armed forces in any of Italy’s
wars in the twentieth century, together with their immediate families—as
well as those who had been members of the Fascist party, together with
their families—to escape discrimination.113
Nicola Caracciolo has written that “Italian society, more so than any
other under the hegemony of the National Socialists (with the exception
of Holland and Denmark), facing the prospect of their extermination,
chose, as a community, to protect ‘its’ Jews.”114 That “protection” proceeded under Fascist auspices.
107
That thesis was fully compatible with the “race theory” characteristic of Fascist doctrine. See Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism, chap. 6.
108
That was specifically acknowledged by Fascist intellectuals, see Giuseppe Maggiore,
Razza e Fascismo (Palermo: Agate, 1939). Maggiore’s volume is among the more interesting
expositions.
109
Mussolini had already blamed social and political unrest in Ethiopia on social and
sexual contact between the indigenous peoples and Italians. Prior to the “Manifesto of Fascist Racism,” those contacts were increasingly proscribed by Fascist authorities.
110
See the discussion in Antonio Banzi, “Documenti e legislazione,” in Razzismo fascista
(Palermo: Agate, 1939), pp. 209–69; Luciano Elmo, La condizione giuridica degli ebrei in
Italia (Milan: Baldini e Castoldi, 1939).
111
See the comments in Ciano, Ciano’s Hidden Diary, 1937–1938, p. 151.
112
Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, chap. 8.
113
De Felice, Gli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, pp. 349–50. Because of the legal exceptions
provided, about 20 percent of all Jewish-Italian families escaped virtually all discrimination.
See Luigi Preti, Impero fascista africani ed ebrei (Milan: Mursia, 1968), pp. 154–58.
114
Nicola Caracciolo, “Introduction,” in Gli ebrei e l’Italia durante la guerra, 1940–
1945 (Rome: Bonacci, 1986), p. 17.
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
217
The form of anti-Semitism adopted by Fascist Italy, as a consequence,
was singularly different from that of National Socialist Germany. However indecent, it shared few of the genocidal traits that have horrified the
civilized world. Italian Jews suffered innumerable indignities and material
losses, but there is scant, in any, evidence that between 1938 and 1943,
any Jews died at the hands of Fascists simply for having been Jewish.
From 1938, when the first formal anti-Semitic legislation appeared in
Italy, through 1943, Mussolini retained power over the disposition of
Jews under Fascist control. As long as that remained unchanged, thousands of Jews, with Fascist assistance, escaped destruction at the hands of
National Socialists.115 Until July 1943, when, for all intents and purposes,
Fascism collapsed, Mussolini—made increasingly aware of the National
Socialist “final solution” to the Jewish question—communicated to Italian diplomatic, military, and police entities that not a single Jew in Italian
occupied France, Croatia, Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania, or North Africa
should be surrendered to National Socialist forces.116
All of this provides something of the context in which Fascist racism
manifested itself. The original racism that had been intrinsic to Fascist
doctrine was uniquely its own. It was a racism that entertained scant conviction in the superiority of one or another race.117 Its subsequent antiSemitism, after 1938, was to be temporary and was understood to be
tactical. Even at its most vicious, during the last six hundred days of its
existence, Fascism anticipated that anti-Semitism would persist only as
long as the war in Europe continued.
In retrospect, and considered in context, it appears that Mussolini used
Evola’s Sintesi di dottrina della razza exclusively in an attempt to serve
Fascism’s tactical purposes. Nothing of Evola’s exotic ruminations appeared in any official Fascist doctrinal pronouncements. Much the same
115
In very many cases, Fascist authorities allowed, and frequently assisted, Jews to escape
from Europe through Spanish ports on the Atlantic. Many Jews escaped German apprehension by traveling from North Africa, Greece, and Yugoslavia through Italian territory to
ports of embarkation. See the account in Leon Poliakov and Jacques Sabille, Gli ebrei sotto
l’occupazione italiana (Milan: Comunità, 1956). The most comprehensive book on the subject remains that of De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo. A convenient
summary of the entire period can be found in Caracciolo, “Introduction,” and Mario Toscano, “Gli ebrei in Italia e la politica antisemitica del fascismo” in Caracciolo, Gli ebrei e
l’Italia durante la guerra, 1940–1945, pp. 17–34.
116
The Fascist resistance caused extraordinary difficulties for the Italians. Nonetheless,
it continued until Fascist Italy no longer controlled its own policies. See Renzo De Felice,
“Preface” to Caracciolo, Gli ebrei e l’Italia durante la guerra 1940–45, pp. 8–9, and De
Felice, Gli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, pp. 456–67.
117
In September 1940, Mussolini affirmed, “races exist . . . that is an undeniable fact.
There are no superior or inferior races.”Mussolini, as cited, De Begnac, Palazzo Venezia,
p. 642.
218
CHAPTER NINE
had been the case at the time of Mussolini’s negotiations, concerning the
proposed Concordat, with the Catholic Church. Evola’s writings were to
be used exclusively, as they had on that occasion, to serve Mussolini’s
tactical purposes and then be allowed to fade away.118
In dealing with National Socialist Germany, Mussolini needed a convenient, and well-publicized, expression that might persuade the Germans
that Fascist Italy entertained “appropriate” racial views. Once again,
Mussolini used Evola’s writings for his own purposes. As has been indicated, he early decided that Evola was an hysteric—but that his views
might serve to convey, to equally hysterical fanatics in National Socialist
Germany, Fascism’s seriousness of purpose.119
What seems evident is the fact that by 1941 Mussolini had every reason
to seek to ingratiate himself to his German ally. By that time, the war had
gone very badly for Fascist Italy. Singularly inferior to their opponents
in terms of ground forces, airpower, armor, antiaircraft and antiarmor
capabilities, the Fascist military had become almost abjectly dependent
for their ultimate survival upon direct German support, transferred from
the Continent to the Balkans and North Africa. Mussolini urgently
needed something to convince the Germans that Fascist Italy was a serious
ally. He employed Evola’s volume to that end.120 As has been indicated,
Evola’s Sintesi of 1941 was replete with references to “Aryan-Nordics”
and their intrinsic superiority as well as to threats emanating from their
“antithesis”—the Jews.121
Beyond that, it is not clear how carefully Mussolini read Evola’s crabbed
and vatic exposition. Given his convictions concerning race, anti-Semitism, and epistemology, it would be hard to imagine that his “recommendation” (if, in fact, one had actually been made) of Evola’s works rested
on any notion of the book’s intrinsic merits. As suggested, the recommendation was more than likely prompted by transient and tactical considerations. From an “orthodox” Fascist perspective, almost everything was
wrong with Evola’s views.
118
There are reports that some of Evola’s publications were used in the political training
schools of the Republic of Salò. Their titles have not been made available, and I have not
been able to confirm any such use.
119
In fact, there appears to have been but few members of the intellectual hierarchy of
the National Socialist German Workers Party who found much cognitive merit in Evola’s
work. See H. T. Hansen, “A Short Introduction to Julius Evola,” in Evola, Revolt against
the Modern World, p. xviii. Evola sought to ally imself with the old German aristocracy.
See Evola, Il cammino del cinabro, pp. 151–52.
120
Throughout the period of increasing Fascist military defeats Mussolini became increasingly submissive to German influence. See the discussion in Renzo De Felice, Mussolini
l’alleato: Part 2. La guerra civile, 1943–1945 (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), passim.
121
Evola, Sintesi di dottrina della razza, p. 172.
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
219
Evola clearly held Mussolini and Fascism to have been nothing other
than a “hypnotic” side show that might be conveniently employed as a
means of communicating the profound realities of a transcendent world
to those capable of understanding.122 It seems clear that throughout his
life, Evola sought to use Fascism’s instrumentalities to educate a truly
“spiritual” elite who would undertake the restoration of the “Traditional” virtues of the ancient world. All that notwithstanding, by 1943
Mussolini’s tactical decision to allow Evola to masquerade as a Fascist
intellectual bore bitter consequences.
By that time, with the collapse of the Fascist military, the king had
asked for Mussolini’s resignation—and upon his refusal proceeded to depose and arrest him. Mussolini’s rescue by German commandoes led to
the tragic effort to reestablish a Fascist presence in the north of Italy.
Under German auspices, Mussolini was installed as the head of the Fascist
Social Republic of Salò.
As was to be fully expected, Evola maintained his distance. He rejected,
in its entirety, the ideology of the Social Republic—and while he drew a
stipend from the Fascist republican government, refused to reside within
its political confines.123 At the same time, he continued to identify himself
with a number of marginal political persons, including Giovanni Preziosi,
the spokesman for Italy’s small coterie of committed anti-Semites, and
Roberto Farinacci, an anti-Semite and an outspoken ally of National Socialist Germany124—all political and doctrinal opponents of Mussolini.
During the final six hundred days of republican Fascism, Evola remained in Rome until the city was threatened by imminent occupation by
Allied forces. There, as he later affirmed, he worked not for Fascism, or
National Socialism, but to create a political movement that, at the conclusion of the conflict then in progress, would continue the struggle against
the “modern world.” Neither Fascist nor National Socialist, Evola sought
to create a movement that would labor for neither Fascism nor National
Socialism—but for a “truly Traditional Right.”125 That was the political
movement that survived the war. It had precious little to do with Fascism.
For the history of Fascist doctrine, it is of some significance that virtually all the intellectuals with whom Evola associated explicitly opposed
Giovanni Gentile, both as a political figure and as the “philosopher of
122
Ibid., p. 130.
See Evola’s comments on Fascist ideology in general, and that of the Republic of Salò
in particular in Evola, Il cammino del cinabro, pp. 82–89, 175–76.
124
See the account in Aldo Mola, “Giovanni Preziosi,” in Fabio Andriola, ed., Uomini e
scelte della RSI: I protagonisti della Repubblica di Mussolini (Foggia: Bastogi, 2000), pp.
157–78; and Gianfranco de Turris, “Un tradizionalista nella RSI: Julius Evola, 1943–1945,”
Nuova storia contemporanea 5, no. 2 (March–April 2001), pp. 79–86.
125
Andriola, Uomini e scelte della RSI, pp. 175–76.
123
220
CHAPTER NINE
Fascism.” As anti-Gentileans, Evola and those with whom he most readily
identified rejected the humanism of Gentile’s Actualism, as well as its
moral opposition to anti-Semitism and biological racism.126 Roberto Farinacci, Carlo Costamagna, and Preziosi were all anti-Actualists and antiSemites.127 All exercised some influence over developments during Fascism’s end days in the Republic of Salò. One of the consequences was the
creation of an intellectual and political environment that was to ultimately render Fascism complicit in the murder of Jews.
No longer in control of his government, Mussolini was compelled to
accommodate political and doctrinal influences not of his choosing. As a
result, the malevolence of Preziosi and Farinacci shaped something of the
reality in which Jewish Italians found themselves. During the final days
of Fascism, Jews suffered mounting indignities, and their circumstances
became increasingly perilous. Their property was confiscated and they
were collected in significant numbers by the Fascist Black Brigades to be
surrendered to National Socialist forces in Italy—a consignment that was
tantamount to a death sentence.128 Renzo De Felice has written, “the RSI
(Repubblica sociale italiano) assumed an official position with respect to
the Jews that was different than that of the Germans. It was undoubtedly
more humane, and distant from any idea of mass extermination. In practice, however, the RSI found itself compelled to tolerate and assist in the
indiscriminate arrests, in the massacres, and the deportations undertaken
by the Germans, often in violation of Italian law.”129
Fascism’s unhappy misalliance with National Socialism had culminated
in those tragic consequences—but the way was facilitated by elevating
Julius Evola to the totally unwarranted level of an intellectual “spokesman” for Fascism. He had early allied himself with those persons who
126
See Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, chap. 8.
After his first efforts to ingratiate himself with Gentile (see Stefano Arcella, “L’epistolario Evola-Gentile,” Futuro Presente 3, no. 6 [Spring 1995], pp. 79–88), Evola became his
dogged opponent. See, for example, his explicit rejection of “neo-Idealism,” whose doctrines opposed “true racism.” His most fundamental objections turned on the “rationalism”
of Actualism (Evola, “Filosofia etica: Mistica del razzismo,” Difesa della razza 4, no. 11 [5
April 1941], pp. 12–15). After the Second World War, Evola was very explicit in his objections (see Evola, “Gentile non è il nostro filosofo,” Minoranza 2, nos. 5–7 [1 August–20
October 1959], pp. 22–27). Farinacci was both anti-Gentilean as well as expressly antiSemitic (see Roberto Farinacci, Realtà storiche [Cremona: “Cremona nuova,” 1939], pp.
81–169). It is interesting to note that other important Fascist anti-Semites were also antiGentilean (see Paolo Orano, Il fascismo [Rome: Pinciana, 1940], pp. 229–97; and Gli ebrei
in Italia [Rome: Pinciana, 1938]). Carlo Costamagna, who provided Evola considerable
space in his publication, Lo stato, was similarly opposed to Gentile (see Gregor, Giovanni
Gentile, pp. 73–75), as well as a defender of a qualified form of racism (see Costamagna,
Dottrina del fascismo, pp. 185–209).
128
Responsible estimates put their number at about seven thousand.
129
De Felice, Gli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, pp. 518–19.
127
DOCTRINAL INTERLUDE
221
would be instrumental in burdening Fascism with an ill-contrived and
immoral racism and an equally repugnant anti-Semitism that violated almost every principle of integral nationalism, revolutionary syndicalism,
corporativism, and Gentilean Actualism that had given form and substance to historic Fascism. Mussolini’s tactical decision to reduce the ideological distance between Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany
through the employment of the work of Julius Evola was paid for at exorbitant cost.
CHAPTER TEN
Doctrinal Continuity and the
Fascist Social Republic
THROUGH ITS final years, Fascism struggled to survive in a whirlwind of
destruction. With the devastating losses suffered on the Russian front and,
after 1942, the loss of its African empire, dissent mounted throughout
Fascist Italy. The war itself generated doctrinal cross-pressures that produced anomalies such as the emergence of the mysteriosophic racism of
Julius Evola1 together with the rise of a vicious Fascist intransigence.
Fascist Italy had entered the Second World War as an ally of National
Socialist Germany in June 1940.2 Almost from the very first day of its
involvement, the war went badly. Ill-equipped and indifferently led, the
Italian armed forces, in general, performed poorly.3
1
There can no longer be any doubt of the anomalous nature of Evola’s racism. His “mystic Traditionalism” was no more Fascist than it was National Socialist. National Socialists
and Fascists alike did not take him seriously. See the discussion in H. T. Hansen, “Introduction: Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors,” in Julius Evola, Men among the Ruins: Post-war
Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002), pp. 50–95.
2
Mussolini had informed Hitler early in 1939 that because of its inadequacies and weapons shortfall, Italy was not prepared to enter into a sustained conflict against Great Britain
and France before 1942. In August 1939, when it became evident that Hitler intended to
invade Poland, Mussolini reaffirmed the inability of Italy to directly participate unless Germany could make available major resources. The Germans did not have the required supplies available, and Italy was charged with the responsibility of holding down the forces of
France and Great Britain in the Mediterranean while Hitler “resolved” the problem of Poland. On 18 March 1940, Mussolini met Hitler at the Brenner Pass and committed Italy to
entry into the conflict. The swift and successful German invasion of France gave the appearance that Fascist Italy entered the war only when the defeat of France was assured. Actually,
Fascist Italy had committed itself months earlier.
3
At the commencement of the Second World War, the military commanders of the Italian
armed forces gave every evidence of incompetence. General Pietro Badoglio is reported to
have said that battles “are fought with infantry, rifles, mules and some machine guns—but
not too many machine guns.” The Chief of the Army General Staff, General Alberto Pariani,
held that “It is spirit that transforms an idea into conviction, and it is the spirit that makes
faith of a conviction. And when there is faith, there is animating force for every undertaking.” To which the Fascist, Luigi Federzoni, remarked, “Pariani is a person bereft of a sense
of reality.” Among the six hundred generals of the Italian armed forces (one general for
every thirty-five officers) there was little talk of the availability of heavy equipment. War
was a matter of “spirit.” In 1940, its lack of artillery, antitank weaponry, heavy armor,
aircraft of sufficient speed, range and armament, as well as the absence of antiaircraft capa-
DOCTRINAL CONTINUITY
223
At the end of 1941, in accordance with its treaty obligations, Fascist
Italy declared war against the United States. The defeats that previously
had been disheartening became catastrophic. The difficulties rapidly accumulated. In a desperate move, Mussolini urged Hitler, in the spring of
1943, to seek a separate peace with the Soviet Union in the effort to
dispel the shadow of ultimate defeat that increasingly collected around
the conduct of the war—only to be rebuffed. By the summer of 1943 all
of Italian East and North Africa had been lost to Anglo-American
arms—the defenses of the Italian offshore islands of Pantelleria and
Lampedusa had been compromised and the territories occupied. AngloAmerican forces had begun an invasion of the Continent through Sicily
with the intention of proceeding upward into the heart of Europe
through the peninsular corridor.4
Through July, the military situation continued to deteriorate. AngloAmerican attacks on Italy increased in fury, and it was clear that enemy
invasion threatened the survival of the nation. The members of the Grand
Council of Fascism, led by Dino Grandi, proposed a meeting in which the
situation would be reviewed. A session was fixed for the late afternoon
of 24 July, at which time a proposal was submitted that urged Mussolini
to invite the king, Vittorio Emmanuele III, to assume the responsibility of
military leadership. Mussolini immediately intuited that such a request
would be tantamount to a surrender of political power and the disintegration of his regime.5
In fact, with the Grand Council’s approval of the Grandi proposals—
equivalent to a vote of no confidence in Mussolini—the king requested
that Mussolini step down. Marshall Pietro Badoglio, already groomed to
assume the responsibilities of Head of the Government, did precisely
that—and Mussolini was placed under arrest.
There was some sporadic reaction by individual Fascists, and Fascist
groups, to what was seen to be a palace coup,6 but by and large the transbilities, clearly identified Fascist Italy as an inferior military power. That understood, Field
Marshal Erwin Rommel, as well as the British commanders in Italian East Africa and El
Alamein, testified to the courage and initiative of the individual Italian soldier. What the
Italian military needed were the instruments of war. See Carlo De Biase, L’Aquila d’oro:
Storia dello stato maggiore italiano (1861–1945) (Milan: Il Borghese, 1970), pp. 403–38.
4
See Mussolini’s discussion in Storia di un anno, in Opera omnia (Florence: La fenice,
1953–65. Hereafter Oo), vol. 34, pp. 305–44.
5
See the account in Giorgio Pini and Duilio Susmel, Mussolini: L’uomo e l’opera (Florence: La fenice, 1963), vol. 4, chap. 5; as well as those in Ruggero Zangrandi, 1943: 25
Luglio 8 Settembre (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964); and Pino Romualdi, Dossier: 25 Luglio 1943
(Rome: Ciarrapico, 1978).
6
Manlio Morgagni, Director of “Stefani,” the official information agency of the Fascist
government, committed suicide upon being informed of Mussolini’s dismissal. He wrote,
“The unbearable pain of being an Italian and a Fascist has overwhelmed me. . . . For more
224
CHAPTER TEN
fer of power was effected without major political difficulties. Given the
fact that the king and Badoglio announced that both Fascism and the
war would duly continue, Fascists were uncertain as to what behaviors
recommended themselves. As a consequence, there was great confusion.
Mussolini, for “his own safety,” was transported, under guard, to several
different locales, to be finally deposited on a mountain site at Gran Sasso.
In retrospect, it is clear that the intention of the monarchy and its allies
was that neither the war nor Fascism would continue. Almost immediately
after the coup, the Badoglio government began secret negotiations with
the representatives of the Anglo-American allies to arrange an armistice.
On 8 September, the Badoglio government announced what was to be an
unconditional surrender to the Allied forces. The entire Italian military
collapsed, with commanders abandoning their troops in the field—and
troops laying down their weapons in a disorderly scramble to return home.
Confused and uncertain, many in the military turned to their German
allies for direction. Moved largely by patriotism, rather than Fascist commitments, many of those in the Italian armed forces, holding that the surrender of Italy to the allies was an unconscionable betrayal of trust, took
up arms, under German leadership, against the Anglo-American invaders.7
At the same time, Fascists throughout the nation began to organize.
Even before the announcement of the armistice on 8 September, young
Fascists in Rome had begun initiatives against the “Badogliani” in the
first attempts to reestablish a properly Fascist government. In Trieste, the
offices of the Party were reopened. In Padua, Verona, Brescia, Perugia,
and Ancona, similar efforts were undertaken.
On 12 September, Mussolini was liberated from Italian custody by German special operations units. There is every indication that Mussolini,
physically and morally exhausted, sought nothing more than to be allowed to disappear into history.8 Equally evident was the fact that Italy’s
German allies had absolutely no intention of allowing that to happen.
Adolf Hitler had decided that a committed Fascist Italy was necessary
if the conduct of the war was not to be impaired.9 On the fourteenth,
Hitler, with almost his entire General Staff, met a thin and tragically distracted Mussolini in order to inform him that he was to assume command
of a restored Fascist government—the ally of National Socialist Gerthan thirty years you, Duce, have received all of my fidelity. My life was yours. I ask for
your forgiveness if I depart.” Giorgio Bocca, La repubblica di Mussolini (Rome: Laterza,
1977), p. 3.
7
The SS division “Italia” was subsequently organized to host over ten thousand Italian
volunteers.
8
See Renzo De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato: Part 2 (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), chap. 1.
9
The German military was equally convinced that it would serve their cause better if Italy
were simply occupied. A Fascist government would limit Germany’s freedom of operation.
DOCTRINAL CONTINUITY
225
many—in a war that clearly threatened to destroy them all. On the fifteenth, the dialogue continued—with Mussolini fully aware, by that time,
that he was there to attempt to placate the leaders of a powerful and
vengeful army that occupied all of Italy north of Rome. No one, least of
all Mussolini, believed that the Axis powers could win the conflict then
in what was clearly its final phase. The real question for Mussolini was,
how might Fascism most credibly conclude its historic parabola?10
Required by circumstances to attempt to revive Fascism, Mussolini immediately made clear what his intentions concerning such a reborn Fascism were to be. On the eighteenth, in a broadcast from Munich to the
Italian people, Mussolini announced the formation of a provisional Fascist government that would return Italy to the side of its German ally.
The armed forces of the nation were to be reconstituted. Perhaps more
surprising still, he announced that Fascist Italy, irrespective of the difficult
times it was to traverse, intended to pursue the course of social revolution
it had initiated on its succession to rule in 1922. Fascists would diminish
the influence of domestic “plutocratic” elements—the major Italian industrial and financial agents—in the process.
Mussolini argued that the “plutocratic bourgeoisie,” together with the
monarchy and some elements in the military, had compromised not only
the conduct of the war, but Fascism’s revolutionary course as well. With
the suppression of the monarchy together with some of the major leaders
of industry and their allies, Fascism intended to make labor the “infrangible foundation of the state.”11 There was no longer time for circumspection. Fascism would pursue its social revolution.
In the existing environment, and given the obligations he had assumed,
Mussolini’s position was eminently clear. Fascism had been encumbered
by a variety of extraneous elements. “Bourgeois” conservatives had impaired the evolutionary development of corporativism. The abiding concern for the rapid industrialization of the peninsula had counseled caution
in the past. The time for caution had passed.
Together with all that, the increasingly intense relationship with Hitler’s Germany fostered a penetration of a form of racism into Fascism
that was completely extraneous to its ideology. The anti-Semitism and the
10
Giovanni Dolfin, Mussolini’s director of his Secretariat, in daily contact for much of
the final six hundred days, maintained that Mussolini never “appeared concerned with his
own life. He never considered death as the most grievous of evils.” Mussolini outlined his
concerns (1) for Italy’s very survival as an essentially unarmed dependent, incapable of defending itself, and (2) the entire loss of its revolutionary heritage. Giovanni Dolfin, Con
Mussolini nella tragedia: Diario del Capo della Segreteria Particolare del Duce, 1943–1944
(Cernuseo sul Naviglio: Garzanti, 1949), pp. viii, 26–27, 54–55, 118–21, passim. See Ermanno Amicucci, I 600 giorni di Mussolini (Rome: Faro, 1949), chap. 11.
11
Mussolini, “Il primo discorso dopo la liberazione,” in Oo, vol. 32, pp. 4–5.
226
CHAPTER TEN
initiatic racism of Evola had distorted the ideology of Fascism to the extent that its foremost exponents, like Giovanni Gentile, Sergio Panunzio,
Ugo Spirito, and Camillo Pellizzi, had been, for the most part, alienated.
Tragically, there was no possibility that Fascism could abjure the alien
elements of racism that had collected around it. Given his abject dependence on National Socialist Germany, Mussolini could do very little
more than he did. He acted to contain its worse excesses. Even though
what he did manage was, at best, immoral and cruel, the racism of Fascism’s final years was something substantially different from that of Hitler’s “final solution.”12
In that doleful mix, nothing of Evola’s mystic racism survived, and
very little of the fanatic anti-Semitism of Giovanni Preziosi was permitted to act out its savagery. Jews were harassed and defamed and their
property pillaged, but Hitler’s “final solution” exacted its victims (numbering about seven thousand)13 only over and against persistent Fascist
obstruction.14
It was within this evolving tragedy that Mussolini sought to create a
republican Fascism that would not only attempt to defend the nation from
Anglo-American invasion, but would pursue, as well, the revolutionary
ends that inspired and informed it throughout its history. Mussolini’s first
task was to engage those prepared to serve in what was, at best, a government involved in a devastatingly one-sided conflict. It would be a government without the traditional support of the familiar monarchy—threatened with destruction from an irresistable enemy from without, opposed
with arms by domestic enemies from within, and constrained by the presence of an “ally” that was ill-disposed, vengeful, and suspicious. The reconstitution of the military, in the course of a war that was going very
badly, was itself an unforgiving task. Reorganizing and controlling the
members of a wrathful reborn Fascism was perhaps more difficult still.15
12
See the account of the Fascist treatment of the “Jewish question” during the Repubbica
sociale italiano, 1943–1945, provided by Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il
fascismo new enlarged Ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), pp. 446–86.
13
Fascists were complicit in the murder of Jews to the extent that Italian Jews had been
herded into camps where SS troops might retrieve them. Italians were under orders not
to release Italian Jews to their tormentors—but eventually German orders prevailed.For a
discussion of the camps under Fascist control see the personal memoirs of Salim Diamand,
Dottore! Internment in Italy, 1940–1945 (London: Mosaic Press, 1987).
14
For a general discussion of Fascist racism, see A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile:
Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001), chap. 8; and Gregor,
The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969),
chap. 6.
15
There are several excellent sources for this period. See F. W. Deakin, The Brutal Friendship: Mussolini, Hitler and the Fall of Italian Fascism (New York: Harper and Row, 1962);
and Renzo De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato: Part 2.
DOCTRINAL CONTINUITY
227
As soon as the new Fascist republican government was established in
Northern Italy, the bureaucracy,16 the technical intelligentsia, the clerical
and communications technicians, the engineers and designers, the supervisors and educators, made themselves available, in very substantial numbers. In the North, scientists and instructors remained at their posts. Few
explicitly identified with the new government and few inscribed themselves in the new Partito fascista repubblicano, but very many of those
who had devoted their lives to the nation’s working institutions never
seriously considered abandoning their posts.17
Those traditionally considered “intellectuals”—the scholars, literary
figures, artists, and journalists—also made themselves available, in substantial measure, as well. Notable figures, like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of twentieth-century Futurism, together with many of
his followers, directly or indirectly became involved with the new Fascist
government. They were joined by some of the foremost architects and
artists of Italy.18 Internationally famous intellectuals like Giovanni Gentile, Ardengo Soffici, and Ezra Pound assumed official obligations in the
new system. Many, like Giovanni Papini and Gioacchino Volpe, while not
officially enlisted in either the party or in specific public service, clearly
favored the new government.19 Sergio Panunzio, active during the first
years of the war, already afflicted with his last illness at the time of the
armistice of 8 September 1943, died in early October 1944.
Many of the ministers and subsecretaries of ministries of the regime
through July 1943 adhered to the emerging Fascist government, officially
identified as the “Italian Social Republic” (La repubblica sociale italiano
[RSI]). Some of the most prominent ministers of the old regime, having
been involved in the 24–25 July meeting of the Fascist Grand Council
and the subsequent coup, disappeared. Others, important and politically
untarnished, together with still others who were marginal figures, made
their appearance, either as extensions of German influence—like Roberto
16
See a typical statement in Vito Saracista, Con la Repubblica sociale italiana al servizio
del paese (Milan: Cerea Manara, 1950), chap. 1.
17
See the fuller account in De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato: Part 2; chap. 3.
18
See Carlo Fabrizio Carli, “Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Destini italiani: Artisti in RSI,”
in Fabio Andriola, ed., Uomini e scelte della RSI: I protagonisti della Repubblica di Mussolini (Foggia: Bastogi, 2000), pp. 227–33.
19
Some of the most prominent Fascist intellectuals died before a decision had to be made
concerning adherence to the new government. Enrico Corradini had died in December
1931, A. O. Olivetti in November 1931, Alfredo Rocco in August 1935, Roberto Michels
in May 1936, and Sergio Panunzio in October 1944. Ugo Spirito had distanced himself
before the advent of the Second World War, but as late as 1941 defended Italy’s participation
on what he held to be a “revolutionary war.” See Danilo Breschi, “Guerra rivoluzionaria,”
Mondo Operaio, no. 6 (November–December 2002), pp. 177–83.
228
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Farinacci, Giovanni Preziosi, and Julius Evola—or as advocates of nonFascist aspirations—like Edmondo Cione, the democratic socialist; Nicola Bombacci, the heretical Marxist; and Vittorio Rolando Ricci, the
conservative liberal.20
However disheartened he may have been, Mussolini undertook the creation of the new Fascist republican state with almost frenzied application.21 While it is manifestly evident that his foremost intention was the
protection of the peninsula and its population from Anglo-American and
German predation, equally clear —recognizing that the war was lost—
was his concern with leaving behind a doctrinal and institutional legacy
of his rule. Against very firm German opposition, Mussolini embarked
upon a revolutionary program of “socializing” the Italian economy. In
the midst of a war the imminent loss of which loomed ominously over
everyone, and against the resistance of his only ally, Mussolini committed
himself and the Fascist Republican Party to the socialization of Italian
industry and agriculture.
Many factors influenced that decision. Mussolini was convinced that
the “bourgeoisie,” Italian financial and business interests, allied with the
Catholic Church and the monarchy, had undermined the regime, impaired
its war effort, and thwarted its social and economic programs.22 What did
not appear to influence his decision was a simple desire to remain in
power. His resumption of leadership was insisted upon by Hitler—and
his position was secured by German arms. He was in power and would
remain in power—whether he or anyone else did, or did not, like it—as
long as the Germans dominated the scene. From the very moment of his
return to the leadership of the Fascist Social Republic, it was absolutely
20
See Edmondo Cione, Storia della Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Casterta, “Il Cenacolo,”
1948); Guglielmo Salotti, Nicola Bombacci da Mosca a Salò (Rome: Bonacci, 1986) and
Guglielmo Salotti, “Nicola Bombacci,” in Andriola, Uomini e scelte della RSI, pp. 235–46;
Franco Franchi, Le costituzioni della Repubblica Sociale Italiana: Vittorio Rolandi Ricci il
“Socrate” di Mussolini (Milan: Sugar, 1987); and Fabio Torriero, “Vittorio Rolandi Ricci,”
in Andriola, Uomini e scelte della RSI, pp. 209–16. The Andriola collection addresses itself
to the motivations of these major figures. Clearly there were many whose motivations were
venal, but among the major actors their behavior was largely inspired by a defense of country and its honor.
21
The Germans, who occupied virtually all of Italy not under Allied control, made it
clear that unless a Fascist authority could be reestablished, and Italy were an ally, its population and resources, at the very best, would be treated as booty. As early as 24 September,
only twelve days after his liberation by the Germans, Mussolini could announce that a Fascist republican government had been formed. By 3 October, all the ministries were in place.
See the account to be found in Pini and Susmel, Mussolini, l’uomo e l’opera, vol. 4, chap. 6
and p. 334 together with that of De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato: Part 2, chap. 4, see also p.
373, n. 1.
22
See Mussolini’s own discussion in Storia di un anno (Il tempo del bastone e della carota), in Oo, vol. 34, pp. 339, 345, 410–11 and Amicucci, I 600 giorni di Mussolini, p. 143.
DOCTRINAL CONTINUITY
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clear that he would remain in power as long as Germany controlled what
remained of the Italian peninsula. Whatever the appearances and whatever the judgments of those inflexibly opposed, there can be little doubt
that, within the tragedy that was unfolding, Mussolini sought to achieve
the “logical” conclusion of the social and economic program he had initiated in 1919—as a legacy to those who would succeed him.23
During the first weeks of November 1943, the newly reconstituted Fascist Republican Party held its first assembly in Verona—and formulated
the initial statement of its provisional program for the reconstituted “Social Republic.”24 With the guidance of Mussolini, ten of the eighteen
points of the program were dedicated to the completion of the social and
economic revolution commenced with the March on Rome in 1922.25 The
point was made that “manual, technical and intellectual labor in every
form” was to constitute the “basis of the Social Republic.” While private
property was to be “guaranteed by the state,” it was affirmed that property would not be allowed to “undermine the physical and moral personality” of citizens through exploitation or alienation. Workers and technicians would participate in decisions concerning “the fair apportioning
of wages and the distribution of profits.” More than that, it was clearly
intimated, in the course of the exposition, that the existing leadership of
industry might be displaced by some form of workers’ councils.26
The Verona program suggested the full participation of labor in the
management of industry and the economy in general. The subsequent
elaboration of the program was the product of the collaborative effort of
a number of persons—but primarily Mussolini and Nicola Bombacci, the
intellectually independent revolutionary compatriot of his youth.
Mussolini and Bombacci had been prominent figures in the socialist
movement in the years before the First World War, and Bombacci was
subsequently to go on to serve as cofounder of the Italian Communist
party.27 Bombacci was only one of the number of revolutionary socialists
23
See Mussolini, “Ventennale sviluppo logico della dottrina fascista,” in Oo, vol. 32, pp.
316–18.
24
Mussolini was disposed to call it the “Socialist” Republic, others the “Proletarian”
Republic, but finally the republic was identified as the “Social” Republic in order to satisfy
the sensibilities of some Fascists. See Dolfin, Con Mussolini nella tragedia, pp. 55, 118.
25
An English language translation of the Program of Verona is available in Gregor, The
Ideology of Fascism, pp. 387–91.
26
For the original Italian, see “Il ’Manifesto’ di Verona,” in Bruno Spampanato, Contromemoriale: L’ultimo Mussolini (Rome: Poligrafica italiana, n.d.), vol. 2, pp. 441–43. See
the comments of Roberto Bonini, La repubblica sociale italiana e la socializzazione delle
impresse dopo il codice civile del 1942 (Turin: G. Giappichelli, 1993), p. 15.
27
See De Felice, Mussolini l’alleato, Part 2, p. 539, n. 1; and Guglielmo Salotti. “Nicola
Bombacci,” in Andriola, Uomini e scelte della RSI, p. 240.
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CHAPTER TEN
who entered the ranks of republican Fascism, in 1943, to cooperate with
Mussolini during Fascism’s last fateful six hundred days.
Like many revolutionary socialists, Bombacci saw Fascism as the redemption of a flawed Marxism that failed to appreciate the role of nationalist sentiment in the mobilization of masses. He argued that the Marxist
canon did not seem to appreciate the psychosocial impact of the pretensions of the advanced industrial powers on those communities languishing
in underdevelopment. He clearly appreciated the psychology of peoples
confined to circumstances of retarded industrialization. They were “proletarian peoples,” and “proletarian nations,” in arduous conflict with those
peoples and nations that were “bourgeois.” Like many of the national syndicalists, Bombacci early reflected on the inability of Marxism, as a theoretical system, to answer any of the major concerns of less-developed economies in the competitive and dangerous modern world.
Bombacci, like many Marxists before him, and “left-wing” revolutionaries of the interwar years, saw Fascism as a credible answer to many of
the problems of orthodox socialism28—as the world-historical resolution
of many of the problems of “proletarian nations,” rather than those of an
uncertain, and historically fanciful “proletarian class.”29 Bombacci saw in
the relationship between the “plutocratic” and “proletarian” nations of
the post–World War One era the same relationship that Marx hypothesized with respect to the proletarian and bourgois classes.
In the anticipated Social Republic, both Bombacci and Mussolini saw
the culmination of the revolutionary process commenced in 1919 with the
foundation of revolutionary Fascism. On 13 January 1944, the republican
Council of Ministers approved the “fundamental premises for the creation
of a new structure for the Italian economy.”30 On the foundation of the
Labor Charter of 1927, the decree-legislation of 13 January 1944 addressed
itself to the socialization of all the nation’s productive establishments.
The “fundamental premise” of the new economy was its “socialization.”
The state was to assume management and control over all enterprises essential to the nation’s economic independence: raw materials and energy
supplies, for example, criticial to industrial growth and stability. Becoming
agencies in public law, the capital of the socialized establishments would
be transferred to a single Istituto di gestione e finanziamento (Institute of
Management and Finance)—an institute that would absorb the functions
of the Istituto mobiliare italiano (established in 1931), and the Istituto di
28
See the insightful discussion of Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology
in France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Californa Press, 1986).
29
See Salotti, Nicola Bombacci da Mosca a Salò, pp. 139–49.
30
“Premesse fondamentale per la creazione della nuova struttura dell’economia italiana,” in De Felice, Autobiografia del fascismo: Antologia di tesi fascisti, 1919–1945, pp.
480–81.
DOCTRINAL CONTINUITY
231
ricostruzione industriale (established in 1933), created during the Great
Depression to provide financial assistance and long-term financing to those
sectors of the economy that had suffered most grievously.
The owners of the capital of those nationalized firms, whose management and control passed to the state through the Istituto di gestione e
finanziamento, would receive the value of their capital in the form of state
credits that were interest bearing and fully negotiable. Management and
control, while passing to the state, would be effectuated through councils
of management, elected by all workers—simple and skilled laborers, technicians, and clerical workers. The responsibilities of such a council would
be to deliberate all issues inherent in maintaining and enhancing production within the parameters of the “unitary national plan formulated by
the competent organs of the Social Republic.”
The enterprise councils of state firms would determine wages by having
individual firms contract with labor associations covering entire sectors.
Firms that remained in private hands, employing at least fifty workers,
would be socialized by creating an administrative council, charged with
management, composed of both workers and the representatives of stock
owners in equal number. In establishments that remained privately
owned, the owner, who performed productive technical and/or managerial tasks, would assume, as director, political and juridical responsibilities to the state for the maintenance of production and enterprise discipline. Failing to perform, an owner could be divested of his position. The
issue of successful enterprise management and control might be raised by
the enterprise councils of either state-owned or privately owned firms.
The state would then nominate a successor, with the Istituto di gestione
e finanziamento assuring professional (and presumably political) suitability. Workers’ councils would then either accept a new director or subject
him to the scrutiny that displaced his predecessor.
The Council of Ministers of the Social Republic expected that the details
of the new economic structure would be subject to scrutiny and refinement
through a series of individual pieces of legislation. A great deal of proposed
legislation was generated— some of it abandoned in course—particularly
a projected program of reconstruction of the provincial and national corporative organs that would interface with enterprise workers’ council and
discharge information gathering, control, and consultative functions in formulating the republic’s economic plans.31 The projected legislation was
considered far too cumbersone to undertake in the circumstances that prevailed during the first months of 1944, but it made clear what the ultimate
configuration of the Social Republic was anticipated to be.
31
“Schema di decreto legislativo concernente la istituzione degli organi corporativi,” in
Bonini, La Repubblica sociale italiana, pp. 347–60.
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Because the structure of the “new corporativism” anticipated that socialization included only workers, managers, and technicians per se, there was
no longer any institutional reason to maintain two separate national confederations, one reserved for workers and the other for owners of industrial
plant and financial institutions—as though some fundamental “class” interests distinguished them. Under the conditions stipulated in the legislation
governing socialization, only those employers who functioned as technicians or administrators might serve in the councils of management—to
count as “workers.” As Ugo Spirito had anticipated in his presentation in
Ferrara in 1932, it would no longer be necessary to institutionalize the
difference between “workers” and “owners.” Two national confederations
were no longer necessary, one that included only “workers,” and the other
only “owners” of property, plant, and financial agencies.
Already addressed in the “provisional program of the Manifesto of Verona” (in para. 16), and presented in Decree legislation (no. 853) on 20
December 1944, a single national confederation was proposed—identified as the Confederazione generale del lavoro, della tecnica e delle arti
(General Confederation of Labor, Technology and the Arts), that would
end “the dualistic system” that had prevailed in the past—to be exploited
for their own purposes by the owners of large enterprise and financial
institutions. Together with all that, it was made evident that the political
control of the new unitary confederation would “devolve,” in the last
analysis, upon the leadership of the Partito fascista repubblicano, while
the ultimate technical and administrative national control would be that
of the Minister of the Corporative Economy.32
The rationale advanced to support the new legislation addressed itself
to precedent doctrinal and legislative enactments that had early intimated
just such an ultimate socialization of the nation’s means of production. It
was affirmed that as early as 20 March 1919, for example, Mussolini
had addressed the workers of Dalmine and insisted that they, the direct
producers, were to be the equal of the owners and managers of industry.33
On 9 October, that same year, Mussolini spoke at the first national assembly of Fascists in Florence, where part of the preliminary party program
read that Fascism ultimately intended to have “workers representatives
as members of the technical and administrative management of indus32
See “La costituzione della Confederazione general del lavoro, della technica e delle arti
(Decr. del Duce 20 dicembre 1943, n. 853) and its accompanying political and juridical
rationale, in Bonini, La Repubblica sociale italiana, pp. 216–17.
33
See the full account of the decree-legislation in Bruno Spampanato, Contromemoriale,
vol. 2, pp. 452–54. The entire speech is contained in Mussolini, “Discorso di Dalmine,” in
Oo, vol. 12, pp. 314–16. See the comments of the Minister of Corporations under the Fascist republican government. Angelo Tarchi, Teste dure (Milan: S.E.L.C, 1967), pp. 114–16.
DOCTRINAL CONTINUITY
233
try.”34 On that occasion, Mussolini warned his audience that, confronted
as Italy was by the Western plutocracies, the promised direct participation
of labor into the managerial and directive processes of industry would
necessarily entail an extended period—in order not to disrupt the rapid
development of the nation’s industries—necessary for national defense.35
In April 1927, the Charter of Labor was promulgated, containing the
premises of the anticipated corporative economy. In the preambulatory
work leading to the actual formulation of the Charter, Italians were reminded that given the world situation, with the nation facing increasing
foreign challenge, nothing could be undertaken that would threaten the
nation’s steady industrial growth or competitiveness. At the same time,
labor organizations became public institutions in anticipation of their
consultative participation in the governance of industry. There was no
anticipation that workers’ organizations would immediately and entirely
substitute themselves for the existing leadership of industry—since it was
held that such a change, at that time, would threaten the drive to maximize the nation’s productivity.36 The national interests required economic
and industrial discipline—through collaboration, social welfare initiatives, and legal parity among all the elements of production, if Italy were
to successfully compete with the advanced industrial powers.37 The direct
participation of labor organizations in the govenance of industry would
be gradually accomplished only as circumstances allowed.
The anticipated process was interrupted by the advent of the Great
Depression of the 1930s, into which Italy was inextricably drawn. The
economic crisis precipitated Mussolini’s decision to embark on the effort
to create a “living space” for the nation—a space that would allow Italy
to develop in relative autarky, substantially free from the constraints of
being resource dependent in a world dominated by the advanced industrial powers.
In the early 1930s, Mussolini addressed all these issues. At the same
time, he continued his general program for involving Italian workers in
34
Mussolini, “Ventennale sviluppo logico,” in Oo, vol. 32, p. 317.
Mussolini, “I diritti della vittoria,” in Oo, vol. 14, p. 53. Mussolini always argued that
while political revolution might be undertaken very quickly, economic change necessarily
would involve an extended period of time.
36
Mussolini made his thinking public in that regard. He held that the Bolsheviks, with
their untimely experiments, had destroyed their economy and brought ruin and death on
Russians. See, for example, Mussolini, “Posizioni,” “Non subiamo violenze!” in Oo, vol.
13, pp. 29, 65; “La fine di una illusione,” “Alla moda Russa?” in Oo, vol. 15, pp. 97–99,
178–81.
37
See the entire discussion in Giuseppe Bottai, La Carta del lavoro (Rome: “Diritto del
lavoro,” 1928), pp. 21–39. See Mussolini’s comments on the critical role of increasing productivity in order to compete with the advanced industrial powers. See, for example, Musso35
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the processes of production. He called for workers to “enter more and
more intimately into the productive process” because it had become clear
that while “the past century was the century of capitalist power, the twentieth century would be the century of the power and glory of labor.”38
Concurrently, he began to speak more insistently of the economic independence of Italy—of the necessity of providing “a maximum degree of
economic independence for the nation”—in order to provide for the “possibility of an independent foreign policy.”39
All of this created the circumstances, and the attendant limitations,
within which Fascist corporativism developed. Whatever the real or fancied constraints, Mussolini never surrendered the notion of workers’ participation in the governance of the economy. During the winter of 1941,
for example, in the midst of the war for the nation’s survival, he spoke
unequivocally of a program of socialization that would see labor participating in that governance. At that time, he anticipated the program to
commence at the successful conclusion of the conflict then in progress.40
In the service of that anticipation, he had the constituent pronouncements
of the Fascist Labor Charter formally identified by the Royal Declaration
of 5 February 1941, as the “general principles of the juridical organization of the State” and as constituting “the directive criterion for the interpretation and application of the law.”41 At the foundation of the Labor
Charter was the repeated conviction that the twentieth century would see
labor at the very core of production and the center of the state.
After the events of 25 July 1943, and his restoration to power; in September, Mussolini committed himself to following to its conclusions the
revolutionary political and economic commitments made even before the
March on Rome and the promulgation of the Labor Charter. As has been
suggested, the decision to undertake such manifestly revolutionary
changes in the economy—in the course of a desperate war being fought
on Italian soil—was not governed by a venal search for personal power;
it was a forlorn and desperate attempt to leave a revolutionary legacy.
The rationale for the radical changes in the economy had long since been
articulated by some of Fascist Italy’s most profound intellectuals—intellectuals whose work was publicly recommended and fostered by Mussolini himself.
lini, “L’Adriatico e il Mediterraneo,” “Chi possiede, paghi!” and “Cifre da meditare,” in
Oo, vol. 13, pp. 142–43, 224, 284. The theme surfaces regularly.
38
Mussolini, “Discorso agli operai di Milano,” in Oo, vol. 26, p. 357.
39
Mussolini, “Il piano regolatore della nuova economia italiana,” in Oo, vol. 27, p. 242.
40
See Amicucci, I 600 Giorni di Mussolini, pp. 142–43.
41
Vittorio Emanuele III, “Valore giuidico della Carta del lavoro,” in Bonini, La Repubblica sociale italiana, p. 69.
DOCTRINAL CONTINUITY
235
It is relevant that in his last book, completed about the time of Mussolini’s liberation by the special forces of Hitler’s Germany, Giovanni Gentile
had already spoken of the spiritual realization implicit in the “humanism
of labor” that Fascist corporativism anticipated. Gentile had entertained
special convictions concerning the critical role labor was to play in the
economy of the twentieth century. The first elements of such a view are
to be found in his writings as early as the years immediately following
the First World War—some considerable time before the appearance of
revolutionary Fascism.42
Gentile conceived the modern world attaining a sense of the spiritual
importance of labor, just as it had long acknowledged the spiritual significance of culture. He saw in labor, in work, an activity that shaped the
individual. Echoing much of the philosophical and ethical convictions of
the early Sorelian syndicalists, Gentile gave specific form to the “heroic
and proletarian morality” of Georges Sorel.
Opposed, as were later Fascist thinkers, to a culture that remained far
too “intellectualistic,” Sorel anticipated that the increasingly complex
character of modern industry could only foster the evolution of social and
cognitive consciousness among workers. He was “persuaded that work
can serve as a basis for a culture” that would shape society into a vehicle
for the elevation of humanity.43 It was an essentially idealistic conviction
that was to find its place in the revolutionary syndicalism that occupied
a place among the revolutionaries of Italy.
Gentile articulated very much the same conception as early as 1920, in
his Discorsi di religione.44 As has been indicated, between 1908 and 1920,
many of the revolutionary syndicalists—Sergio Panunzio and A. O. Olivetti among them—made the transition from a form of materialism associated with Marx to antipositivistic idealism increasingly associated with
Gentile’s “humanism of labor.”
Years later, Gentile acknowledged that the Fascist “State of Labor” followed a trajectory begun in the nineteenth century by socialism, which
ultimately culminated in the conviction that only the “humanism of
labor” could provide the most suitable foundation for the Social Republic
of Salò.45 Shortly before his death, Gentile maintained that the full freedom of humans could be achieved only with their organic integration into
42
See Gentile, Genesi e struttura della società (Verona: Mondadori, 1954), pp. 146–47.
Gentile had spoken of the spiritual essence in the humanization of labor even before the
Fascist March on Rome. See Gentile, Discorsi di religione, 3rd ed. (1920; Florence: Sansoni,
1955), p. 26.
43
Georges Sorel, The Illusions of Progress (1908; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1969), p. 157.
44
Gentile, Discorsi di Religione, p. 26.
45
Gentile, Genesi e struttura della società, p. 146.
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the infrastructure provided by the evolving corporativism of the Fascist
ethical state.46
In Italy, it had long been held that only the activity of intellectuals and
artists were matters of “culture.” What Gentile argued was that labor,
increasingly involving cerebration and creative activity, was also a matter
of culture, an evolving process through which individuals might develop
into that which they could, and should, be.47 He saw Fascist corporativism
as an arena in which that process might be increasingly realized.
Those were among the normative concepts that influenced the thought
of some of Fascist Italy’s most important thinkers—all, in some measure,
Gentileans. Ugo Spirito, Luigi Fontanelli, and Camillo Pellizzi all were
advocates of a Fascist “socialism”—a socialism that would see the direct
engagement of workers in the self-developmental process of labor. They
had all consistently held that just such a form of Gentilean “socialist humanism” would gradually emerge from the revolution of 1922.48
Those doctrinal convictions animated Spirito’s delivery before the syndical and corporative conference that took place in Ferrara in May 1932.
As has been argued, his entire delivery was predicated on Gentilean
Actualism. In his exposition at Ferrara, Spirito applied Actualist convictions to the political and economic circumstances of Fascist Italy. He argued that its very logic dictated that Fascist corporativism, then passing
through a transitional phase, would eventually have to transcend economic individualism, and its attendant capitalist commitment to “private
property,” with which it was burdened, in order to “socialize” the economy. He understood the transition would, of necessity, be gradual—if
for no other reason than the fact that rapid change might further destabilize an already impaired economy—given the international depression
then raging.
Granted that, he maintained that Fascist corporativism remained confounded by the legacy of liberal economic thought. The structure of corporativism embodied all the critical elements of a bifurcated productive
system. There was labor institutionalized in the Confederazione del sinda46
Gentile, “Discorso agli italiani,” in Benedetto Gentile, ed., Giovanni Gentile dal discorso agli italiana alla morte (Florence: Sansoni, 1951), p. 71.
47
See the discussion in Gentile, Genesi e struttura della società, pp. 146–47; and H. S.
Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1960), p. 273. For an interesting account of how “labor” as “activity” would function in
“self-development,” see Vito A. Bellezza, L’Esistenzialismo positivo di Giovanni Gentile
(Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1954).
48
Their convictions were constantly evolving. See, for example, Danilo Breschi, “Technica e rivoluzione: Il fascismo nel pensiero di Ugo Spirito,” in Annale della fondazione Ugo
Spirito (Milan: Luni Editrice, 2000). vol. 9, pp. 337–410. See the discussion in Daniele
Gaudenzi, “Dal sindacalismo eroico all’umanesimo del lavoro,” in Vittorio Vettori, Giovanni Gentile (Florence: La fenice, 1954), pp. 163–70.
DOCTRINAL CONTINUITY
237
cati industriali on the one hand, and the owners of plant and the employers of labor in the Confederazione dell’industria—with the political state
attempting to act as a “neutral mediator” of their respective interests.49
Spirito maintained that, in principle, Fascism sought not to institutionalize the differences between the factors of production, but to accomplish
their ultimate identity. Given that intention, Spirito argued that what Fascism was obliged to achieve was the gradual disassembly of the economic
corporations of the early 1930s, and create one single organization that
involved all the active constituents of production.
Spirito contended that the two then existing confederations, even if
only temporarily, reflected the prerevolutionary duality of the nation’s
productive processes. In 1932 and 1933, he advocated the construction
of a single confederation made up of all elements involved directly in
the maintenance and increase of production. He pointed to the seventh
article of the Carta del lavoro, which affirmed that private property in the
Fascist state found legitimacy only as an instrument of the state. If private
property failed to satisfy the needs of the community, it was to be controlled and administered by the state. He proceeded to argue that in
those circumstances, capital might be effectively subsumed by the corporation, with workers enjoying the rewards of ownership. That would
eliminate the distinction between workers and employers—between
workers and capitalists.
Out of the new relationship to be achieved in an anticipated “integral
corporativism,” plant, syndicates, corporations, and the state would
unite, to resolve all the antinomies that characterized the first stages of the
Fascist social and economic revolution. Given the changes he advocated, a
unitary national economic plan would be the capstone of the emerging
“new corporativism.” The Fascist state, possessed of efficient agencies
that systematically collected industrial, agricultural and census statistics
of all kinds, would formulate a programmatic, indicative, national economic plan that would make manifest the union of all interests in the
reality of the nation—a reality already given substance in the regional and
circumscribed plans involved in the “battle for grain,” the vast reclamation programs in the rural areas, and the systematic expansion of hydroelectric production.50 In effect, almost all the elements of the social and
economic changes implemented in the Social Republic after 1943 were
anticipated in the early 1930s in the work of Ugo Spirito, Gentile’s most
gifted representative among Fascist intellectuals.
49
See the discussion in Spirito, “Verso la fine del sindacalismo,” reproduced in Il corporativismo, pp. 436–39.
50
See the account given in 1933 in “L’Economia programmatica corporativa,” in Spirito,
Il corporativismo, 421–52.
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As has been indicated, as Fascism reached its doctrinal maturity in the
1930s, Spirito was at the very center of a dispute that turned on the issue
of what Fascist corporativism was becoming and what it was to become.
His opponents at the time were representatives of big business, orthodox
Catholicism, economic liberalism, and anti-Marxism in a number of variants—all elements Mussolini identified as obstructing the free passage of
the Fascist revolution.51
Spirito was the most prominent of the Gentilean idealists who provoked the acrimonious discussion concerning an emerging Fascist socialism. It was he who sought to distinguish between those elements in Fascism that would only survive during the period of transition and those
that constituted Fascism’s “living and vital” essence. Spirito specifically
identified as “living and vital” Fascism’s increasing appeal to national
planning, its emphasis on the identification of the individual with the community, and their totalitarian inclusion in the historic and dynamic institutional reality of the state.52
Spirito spoke of the productive role of managers as distinct and independent of the passive role of capital in industry, which argued that they,
as distinct from those who simply owned capital assets, should be incorporated into the ranks of labor. Technological and managerial activity
were to be understood as integral parts of productive labor to the exclusion of capital per se.53
That constituted part of the rationale for a unitary confederation of
labor and technology operating within a planned national economy. As a
Gentilean, Spirito identified the individual with the state. A single organization of all productive factors would make a structured reality of that
identification. An organization of workers in an institution that represented only labor as distinct from capital could only compromise that
identification. For Spirito, corporativism was intended to transcend the
antinomy that characterized labor and capital in liberal economic systems.54 For Spirito, to achieve that identity of purpose, the duality represented by the corporative system of the early 1930s would have to be
resolved. The arrangements anticipated that while capitalists would continue to receive compensation for delaying the gratification that would
51
See the discussion in A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001), chap. 7; and Spirito’s response to Gino Olivetti’s criticisms after the conference at Ferrara in “Riposte alle obiezioni,” in Spirito, Il corporativismo, pp. 361–67.
52
Ugo Spirito, “Introduction” to Capitalismo e corporativismo (Florence: G. C. Sansoni,
1933), pp. xi–xx.
53
Ibid., pp. 7, 9
54
Spirito, “Verso la fine del sindacalismo,” in Capitalismo e corporativismo, pp. 119–23.
DOCTRINAL CONTINUITY
239
attend their immediate use of funds, the role of capital would become
increasingly passive, a contingent concern for the totalitarian community.
In the mid-1930s, the “integral corporativism” that Spirito anticipated
would see unskilled and skilled workers, plant employees, technicians,
and managers all represented at the plant level, rather than in national
category confederations. All would benefit through wage and profit increments that would result from expansion in production. The simple ownership of capital assets would also deliver benefits, but stock owners would
have only passive involvement in the productive process itself.55 The purpose of such a “totalitarian” arrangement was to foster the increasing
spiritual fulfillment of workers—skilled or unskilled, technicians or managers—as part of the Actualist program of individual actualization.56
Throughout his delivery, Spirito had made evident his conviction that
Fascism recognized the positive features of “socialism,” “Bolshevism,”
and/or theoretical “communism” in the process of self-actualization that
was at the center of Gentile’s thought. Spirito contended that both capitalism and liberal economics, as the material and ideological foundation of
political and economic individualism, had run their course. In the world
of the mid-1930s, they had been revealed as increasingly dysfunctional,
sustaining political and economic systems that impaired both the viability
and development of humanity—as well as the survival capacity of the
communities that were their hosts.
Concerned as it was with rapid industrialization, Fascism had retained
some features of economic liberalism during its first revolutionary phase
(1922–25), to be followed thereafter by a form of “state capitalism”
(1926–29), that sought to gradually transform the economy into a
planned “integral corporativism” expected to function at the level of
the individual enterprise rather than through nationwide category
confederations.57
As has been indicated, in the course of the discussions that followed
the meetings at Ferrara, Mussolini both read and approved of Spirito’s
exposition.58 It reflected much of his own thought.59 There is persuasive
55
See “Individuo e stato nell’economia corporativa,” in Capitalismo e corporativismo,
pp. 3–24.
56
Capitalismo e corporativismo, pp. 31, 33.
57
Ibid., pp. 21, 42, 47, 52, 56–57, 85, 88; and “L’economia programmatica corporativa,” pp. 96–109; and “Statalismo corporativo,” pp. 113–16. See Spirito’s comments in
Il corporativismo nazionalsocialista (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1934), pp. 12–13, where he
argues for the corporativism of the individual factory, rather than through confederations
of category syndicates.
58
See Spirito, “Benito Mussolini,” in Memorie di un incosciente (Milan: Rusconi, 1977),
pp. 173–87.
59
See, for example, Mussolini, “Discorso per lo stato corporativo” and “Discorso agli
operai di Milano,” in Oo, vol. 26, pp. 86–96 and 355–59.
240
CHAPTER TEN
evidence that had not the necessities of autarky, and the preparation for
the wars associated with creating an adequate resource base for the economic development of Fascist Italy, not intervened, the institutionalization of integral corporativism would probably have been made manifest
by the late 1930s—by the time Fascist doctrine had achieved maturity.60
The themes that were to directly govern the political activity of the
Fascist Social Republic after 1943 were thus to be found in the writings
of many of the Fascist intellectuals of the early and mid-1930s. In January
1933, as an illustrative case, Luigi Fontanelli, like Spirito, addressed himself to the issue of the intrinsic “logic” of Fascist corporativism—before
the Assembly of the National Council of Corporations, chaired by Mussolini himself.
In his presentation, Fontanelli acknowledged Spirito’s priority and essentially expanded his arguments. He held that the duality represented in
the confederations of labor and industry not only threatened the totalitarianism of the Fascist state, but allowed self-serving elements a staging area
for the pursuit of their parochial interests—at the cost of collective national purpose.61 He argued that production in modern industry actively
involved skilled and unskilled labor—with technical competence critical
among its skill requirements. Workers and technicians were the “true protagonists of production.”62 Money remained, at best, a passive prerequisite—a prerequisie that was being increasingly supplied by the state in
Fascist Italy.
Fontanelli went on to argue that it was labor, in all its forms, that provided the dynamic force of production. More than that, he went on to
argue that it was industry’s ethical responsibility to provide labor the
occasion for self-actualization through the prospect of upward mobility.
In an expanding and increasingly sophisticated productive system, the
acquisition of skill by individual workers furthered the purposes of industry as well as the self-realization of all participants. The possibilities of
upward mobility provided the occasion for labor to make of itself what
it could be, and to thereby enhance the total body of skills and expertise
60
In retrospect, it is clear that Ugo Spirito continued as an adviser to Mussolini until the
collapse of the regime in 1943. In 1977, years after the end of the war, Spirito maintained
that he had distanced himself from Fascism around 1935 (see Spirito, Memorie di un incosciente, p. 186). The fact is that at least until late 1942, Spirito continued to advise Mussolini
and contribute to the discussions that involved Fascist intellectuals (see Ernesto Massi, “Le
intuizioni geopolitiche di Ugo Spirito,” and Gaetano Rasi, “Significato storico dell’inedito
spiritiano” in Guerra rivoluzionaria (Rome: Fondazione Ugo Spirito, 1989), in Il pensiero
di Ugo Spirito (Rome: Enciclopedia Italiana, 1988), pp. 509–12, 125–66).
61
Luigi Fontanelli, La logica della corporazione (Rome: “Novissima,” 1934), pp. 28–
34, 50–51.
62
Ibid., pp. 37, 39.
DOCTRINAL CONTINUITY
241
that would, in turn, contribute to national output as well as the increasing
sophistication of production. Efforts at self-development would be rewarded by movement through the levels of skills essential to the productive maturation of the industrial system.
Such an arrangement would tend to satisfy not only the productive
needs of a less than fully developed industrial economy, but would address, as well, the moral issues Gentilean Actualism had made prominent.
Spirito had made the point that the very logic of Mussolini’s political
convictions emanated from the principles of the thought of Giovanni Gentile.63 Fontanelli’s exposition was its implicit confirmation.
On 3 October 1933, Mussolini called the attention of Italians to Spirito’s exposition, identifying its theses with those of the offical Dottrina del
fascismo, the philosophical portion of which was the work of Gentile.64 In
a retrospective, years later, after Fascism had receded into history, Spirito
could affirm, with some persuasiveness, that Mussolini, as a Gentilean of
sorts, rather than a “philo-capitalist, a reactionary or an anti-socialist,”
had always been a revolutionary, disposed to a qualified socialist solution
for Italy’s social and economic problems.65 In substance, both Spirito and
Fontanelli, inspired by Actualism, proposed some of the same features of
“integral corporativism” advanced by Mussolini upon his resumption of
the leadership of republican Fascism in 1943.
That none of this was casual is indicated by the doctrinal thought of
Camillo Pellizzi, who since April 1940 served as president of the Istituto
nazionale di cultura fascista, selected specifically by Mussolini to educate
Italians to their national responsibilities. As a qualified Gentilean,66 Pellizzi was a critical supporter of Spirito’s programmatic economics—which
he did not hesitate to call “Fascist communism.”67
As the prime mover of the Istituto nazionale di cultura fascista after
Gentile’s departure, Pellizzi’s responsibilities expanded geometrically
with Italy’s entry into the Second World War. Both Sergio Panunzio and
Spirito worked with Pellizzi on projects that were considered essential to
63
See the discussion in Spirito, “Benito Mussolini,” in Memorie di un incosiente, pp.
173–80.
64
Mussolini, “Segnalazione,” in Oo, vol. 26, pp. 68–69.
65
Spirito, Memorie di un incosiente, pp. 182–87.
66
Pellizzi made his Actualist commitment evident in his first major work. See Pellizzi,
Fascismo—aristocrazia (Milan: Alpes, 1925), pp. 30–31, 36–37, 40–41, 48–49, 170–
71, 189.
67
Pellizzi had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1925. That created some considerable
tension in the coherence of his Actualism. Many Gentileans attempted to reconcile their
Actualism with orthodox Catholicism—a daunting task. See the account in Gisella Longo,
L’Istituto nazionale fascista di cultura: Gli inellettuali tra partito e regime (Rome: Antonio
Pellicani, 2000), pp. 177–85. See R. Suzzi Valli, Il “fascismo integrale” di Camillo Pellizzi
(Rome: Annali della Fondazione Ugo Spirito, 1995).
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CHAPTER TEN
the maintenance of mass allegiance. That included the publication of
Civiltà fascista, which anticipated many of the problems that would
collect around the government and the party as the war drew on. There
was talk of a rigorously planned economy in which labor would finally
find its place. All of this was understood by Fascist intellectuals to represent the reality of the existence of a class of similar modern economic
regimes—the product of historic circumstances—that included Soviet
communism.68
In the course of the discussion concerning the future of Fascist corporativism, Civiltà fascista carried articles directly and indirectly calling attention to the Gentilean concept of the cultural character of modern labor.
The argument was that as labor became increasing sophisticated, it would
assume something of the traditional character of culture, assuring modern
labor a place in society commensurate with its individualizing and developmental potential.69
Pellizzi recognized that steady increments in production were essential
to developing Italy,70 but he insisted—as did Sorel and Gentile before
him—that production, and the processes it entailed, also provided the
occasion for the working out of moral issues. Production was not only
the source of commodities; it also, and primarily, afforded labor opportunities for self-development. Modern workers could form part of a labor
aristocracy that, in turn, would constitute part of the political elite that
would govern the nation.71 As we have seen, in the years that were to
follow, Fontanelli, like Spirito, would develop the argument and anticipate the self-development of workers through initiatives that would lift
them above the level of ordinary unskilled labor to the rank of skilled
technical enterprise.72
While Pellizzi had anticipated all this almost two decades before the
legislation that sought its realization in the Social Republic, he was
equally clear that he had not expected the maturation of Fascist corporativism to be rapid. In 1925, he held that the fulfillment of its promise
might take half a century. He was convinced that the revolutionary
68
See, for example, Guido Carli, “Dell’economia pianificata,” Civiltà fascista 9, no. 11
(September 1942), pp. 680–86 and no. 12 (October 1942), pp. 757–63, as well as Pellizzi,
“Ordine corporativo e programmazione sociale,” Civiltà fascista 10, no. 6 (April 1943),
pp. 351–55.
69
See Luigi Volpicelli, “Natura e funzione del lavoro scolastico,” Civiltà fascista 9, no.
4 (February 1942), pp. 239, 243, and “Premesse per una cultura operaia,” Civiltà fascista
no. 7 (May 1942), pp. 430–38.
70
Fontanelli was equally aware that production and its increase was essential to the survival and enhancement of the nation. See Fontanelli, La logica della corporazione, p. 130.
71
Ibid., pp. 118–21.
72
See ibid., pp. 73–78.
DOCTRINAL CONTINUITY
243
changes implicit in Fascism required time if Italy was not to follow the
tragic path of the Soviet Union—which saw the collapse of industry and
agriculture and the attendant famines that drove Russians, Ukrainians,
and Georgians to absolute despair. To avoid the horrors that afflicted the
Bolshevik revolution, Fascism sought the same radical changes through
systematic, if gradual, reform.73
In his exposition of 1925, Pellizzi identified Fascism with Gentilean
Actualism and correspondingly saw it as an “engine” of change. Italy, like
the Soviet Union, sought to address the social and economic issues of the
modern world.74 The critical difference was that Fascism saw those issues
as fundamentally ethical rather than simply materialistic.
Almost a decade later, Fontanelli repeated the same theses. Like Bolshevism, Fascism addressed modern problems. That they would share similarities simply meant that the character of revolution in the twentieth century was shaped by a set of common concerns—the industrialization of
retrograde economies. That, together with the crisis of industrial capitalism that afflicted the entire globe after 1929—signaling the passing of
market capitalism—meant that the state, whatever its political persuasion, would become increasingly involved in national production. Production would become increasingly planned, with increasing participation by
skilled workers, technicians, and trained managers. That would render
workers, once simple vendors of labor, conscious agents in the making of
their own lives and circumstances.75
When Fontanelli was criticized for presumably anticipating that labor
would dominate the system, he responded that while labor, skilled and
fully conscious of both its involvement and its moral responsibilities, was
required to have a detailed and particularistic vision of its tasks, only
a political leadership was possessed of that “panoramic” oversight that
ensured the gradual realization of both national productive and normative goals. In effect, under the arrangements of the anticipated “state of
labor,” he expected the political leadership of a corporativist Italy, a minority, to be ultimately responsible for the general planning of the national economy.76
The discussion devoted to the final realization of Fascist corporativism
continued throughout the war. Until 1943, both Pellizzi and Fontanelli
continued their programmatic recommendations. What appears evident,
73
Pellizzi, Fascismo—aristocrazia, pp. 150, 153–54.
Ibid., pp. 124, 157, 169, 197.
75
Fontanelli, Logica della corporazione, pp. 28–29, 30–31, 67–69, 81–83.
76
Fontanelli responded in that fashion in 1941, two years before the advent of the Italian
Social Republic. Once again, he had fully anticipated the subsequent development of Fascist
corporativism. See Fontanelli, Logica della corporazione e relative polemiche (Rome:
U.E.S.I.S.A., 1941), pp. 203–9.
74
244
CHAPTER TEN
given the pervasive similarities one finds in their work and in the legislation passed during the tenure of the Fascist republican government, is that
Mussolini, and significant members of the Fascist elite, continued to find
inspiration in the discussion.77 In fact, the entire discussion that turned
on the issues of integral corporativism and Fascist socialism created an
intellectual environment in which some Marxists and independent socialists found a place. Both Nicola Bombacci and Edmondo Cione, together
with a surprisingly large number of intellectuals—some with a lifetime
identification with socialism in one or another form—could find moral
and intellectual affinities in the Fascism of the last six hundred days.
Gentile had long since identified socialist values as elements inherent in
Fascism since its conception. He recognized some of his own inspiration
in the early writings of Marx—when Marx was largely under the direct
influence of Hegel. Toward the end of his life, Gentile acknowledged the
socialist origins of Fascism when he identified Italian communists as “impatient corporativists” who failed to understand the logical and “dialectical” development of an historic social and philosophical idea.78
The effort to actually accomplish the socialization of the Italian economy involved, of course, factors having very little to do with the origins
of Fascism’s ideological commitments. After July 1943, Fascist Italy was
no longer master of its own house. When the government of Pietro Badoglio undertook to surrender to the Anglo-Americans, the Germans occupied all of Italy not yet under Allied control. The creation of a republican
Fascist government, largely the creature of the German military, became
subject to German arbitration and control. As soon as the Germans heard
of Mussolini’s decision to embark on the socialization of the economy,
they immediately signaled their concern that such initiatives might negatively impact war production. General Hans Leyers was charged with the
responsibility of assuring that Italian war production continue without
interruption even during the trying times generated by the political, economic, and military confusion following the July coup and the Italian
surrender in September 1943.79
Leyers, in discharging his obligations, was in charge of a commission
entitled Rüstungs und Kriegsindustrie, or RUK, that extended “protec77
The clear evidence is that Mussolini would not accelerate the changes anticipated by
intellectuals like Spirito and Fontanelli—even though they conformed to his ideological convictions—because he anticipated the advent of conflict on a world scale, which required
that he do nothing that might threaten heavy industrial production. After the events of
1943, it was clear that the war, for all intents and purposes, was lost. Socialization became
a concern for a Fascist “legacy.” See the account in Tarchi, Teste dure; and Giuseppe Pardini,
“Angelo Tarchi,” in Andriola, Uomini e scelte della RSI, pp. 129–45.
78
Gentile, “Discorso agli italiani,” in Giovanni Gentile, p. 72.
79
See the discussion in Deakin, The Brutal Friendship, pt. 3, chap. 8.
DOCTRINAL CONTINUITY
245
tion” to all and any armaments and support industries on the peninsula—
in order to insulate them from any civil or political interference that might
negatively affect output committed to war production.80 Leyers entertained
grave misgivings concerning any effort to embark on any form of experimentation in industry. Together with General Karl Wolff, commander of
all SS forces in Italy, and Rudolph Rahn, the German ambassador to the
republic, he impeded almost every effort to socialize the economy. The
Germans made common cause with major Italian industrialists, who were
more than dubious about the Fascist experiment.81 Representatives of
Swiss financial institutions, particularly important in the funding of hydroelectric installations in Italy, warned the Fascist government that socialization would dampen enthusiasm for investment among Swiss financiers.
Against all this dedicated opposition, Mussolini persisted in his efforts.
In a period of about sixteen months, against the resistance of the Germans, some major Italian industrialists, as well as some of the most important financial houses of Europe, republican Fascists substantially socialized about seventy-six regional industries involving perhaps as many
as 126,000 workers. The bulk of the socialized enterprises were publishing and paper manufacturing establishments, but some were critical industries. Alfa Romeo, Motomeccaniche, Fiat, Acciaierie e Ferriere Lomabarde, Puricelli, Olivetti, Ansaldo, and Montecatini were among the
largest in which socialization was undertaken.82
Among all the obstructions to socialization, the general indifference
and/or hostility of Italian workers played a significant role. Public sentiment was largely determined by the continued defeat of Fascist and German forces in the air and on the ground. By the turn of 1945, Italian
workers had become hostile and generally refused to cooperate in the
election of workers’ councils.83 By the time that Fascists were prepared to
embark upon general socialization of the economy, there was no longer
time. Anglo-American forces had broken through the last organized resistance in Northern Italy. Only Fascist irregular warfare slowed, for a brief
time, the Allied forces flooding into the Po Valley. By the end of April,
Mussolini, together with most of the political leadership of the Social
Republic, had fallen before the guns of anti-Fascist Italians. The Fascist
experiment was over.
80
See the comments in Dolfin, Con Mussolini nella tragedia, pp. 119–20; and Piero Pisenti, Una repubblica necessaria (R.S.I.) (Rome: Volpe, 1977), pp. 100–8.
81
See the discussion in Rocca, La repubblica di Mussolini, pp. 171–78.
82
See the discussion in Cione, Storia della Repubblica sociale italiana, pp. 308–9.
83
See Bocca, La repubblica di Mussolini, pp. 165–68.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Conclusions
THE END OF Mussolini’s Fascism came amid mountains of ruins and the
unnumbered dead that haunted the final days of the Second World War.
The Italy that Fascism imagined would be the seat of a new civilization
lay prostrate, not even a shadow of the nation that had embodied the
dreams of a generation and that had impressed half a world. It is the
crushed and tattered image of those final days, thrashed out under the
shadow of the swastika, that remains in the collective memory of the last
half of the twentieth century. We are left with an impression that all those
lost and beaten creatures who had followed the siren call of Fascism were,
at best, to be pitied. They could only have been impelled by an unimaginable foolishness or an otherwordly malevolence to have allowed themselves to become involved in so mad an enterprise.
Those who had identified with so distracted an undertaking could only
have been mad themselves, devoid of judgment and moral principle. Fascists must have simply not calculated probabilities. They must not have
thought things through. Worse then that, they must not have considered
the wickedness implicit in the words of their leader or in the formulations
of his ideologues.
And yet, there was more to Fascism than its final days. There was a
time when its call to revolution awakened a response among the youth of
Italy, and the veterans who had served its flag. There was a time when
intellectuals, old and young, spoke of its goals in books and articles as
carefully crafted as any books and articles written to vindicate any revolution, anywhere and at any time. Mussolini’s intellectuals were no better
and no worse than any intellectuals who ever sought to promote their
cause through violence and war.
To begin to appreciate that, one must be somewhat familiar with the
thought of those charged with accounting for Fascism. That is what has
been attempted here. There is no way that one might reconstruct the excitement, the passions, the desperation, and the aspirations that animated
those who sought to foster, sustain, influence, and defend Fascism. We
are left only with the echo of those times—and the lifeless prose of some
singular persons. To maintain that there was no thought in that prose is
untrue. To insist that it addressed itself only to the celebration of violence
and war is equally untrue. That all that is untrue is evident in some of the
CONCLUSIONS
247
works we have here considered. That those works contain errors and that
their appeal may have led many to death and dishonor seems equally
clear—but then, it is a singular doctrine, secular or religious, that has not
done any of that.
Some of that seems to become evident when we allow ourselves to read
something like Curzio Malaparte’s volume, L’Europa vivente, devoted,
as it is, to Fascist thought and its history—written in his youth, in the
very heat of events, when he was a committed follower of Benito Mussolini.1 Almost everything is there in that one volume: an account of the
history of humiliations that infilled the first nationalists with the passion
that carried them into the maelstrom of the First World War, and from
there into nascent Fascism—to the union of nationalism and revolutionary syndicalism, all combined in that “atmosphere of the highest moral
tension” of which Mussolini spoke.2 It was that moral tension that Giovanni Gentile sought to employ to unite all the components of Italy into
a seamless totalitarianism that would be instrumental in the creation of a
new civilization. Malaparte understood all of that. He understood Fascism in its adolescence and first maturity as few other commentators understood it then or now.
Malaparte was a superlative craftsman, and manages to convey,
through his masterful prose, some of the emotion that Fascism evoked
among the young. He supplies dimension not to be found in the writings
of Gentile, or Panunzio, or Spirito. While artful, his account remains
thoughtful. What becomes evident to anyone not unalterably biased is
that the “fascist thought”—filled only with emotion and devoid of critical
reflection—about which many contemporary commentators still speak
with such conviction, has very little to do with the ideology of historic
Fascism that Malaparte knew so well. Malaparte spoke of the ideas that
made up the substance of the Fascism he knew. Those ideas came together
as a consequence of historic circumstances that made economic growth
and industrial development goals that were compelling for both nationalists and revolutionary Marxists. For nationalists, the nation could not
achieve greatness without rapid economic development and the ability to
project its power. For revolutionary syndicalists, the material and proletarian base that was the prerequisite of revolution would not obtain without industrial expansion. Futurists, machine fetishists, and modernizers,
of all and sundry persuasion, collected themselves around the guidons of
1
Curzio Malaparte, L’Europa vivente: Teoria storica del sindacalismo nazionale in L’Europa vivente e altri saggi politici (Florence: Vallecci Editore, 1961), pp. 315–77.
2
Benito Mussolini, “Discorso per lo stato corporativo,” Opera omnia (Florence: La fenice, 1958. Hereafter Oo), vol. 26, p. 96.
248
CHAPTER ELEVEN
the first Fascism.3 War veterans and adventurers of all varieties filled
the ranks of a popular movement led by skillful orators and manipulators
of public sentiment. Gifted intellectuals supplied the rationale that inspired it all.
Over the next two decades, Italy was bundled through a series of crises
and developments scant ever experienced by a less-developed, newly
united nation. There were a series of challenges that tested the mettle of
the new nation. There was the recovery from the ravages of the First
World War, followed by a major surge of economic growth and industrial
expansion—interspersed with major political conflicts—before the Great
Depression brought everything to a ruinous halt. There were then the
great transatlantic crossings and the adventures in exploration. And then
there were instances of international violence and increasing demands for
“living space”—until it all found outlet in the second world conflict that
brought destruction to the entire experiment.
Taken together, all of that made of Mussolini’s Fascism an enormously
complex and consequently unique historical phenomenon.4 What has
been attempted here has not been an effort to understand so complex a
totality of events, or to explain its unfolding, but rather to deliver something of the history of an evolving body of thought produced by intelligent
and articulate spokesmen for the regime. The history that accompanied
the development and expression of that thought has been alluded to only
insofar as it was assessed to be necessary for exposition.
Given the obligations attendant upon such an exposition, recourse has
been made to primary sources, to the writings of a chorus of selected
intellectuals. The principal thrust of the exposition has been to pursuasively portray what is taken to be the coherence and relevance of Fascist
social and political thought in its temporal context.
Clearly, what is required to capture a sense of the fullness of historic
reality is that a distinction be made between Fascist thought and Fascist
behavior—just as one must distinguish Marxist or democratic thought
from Marxist or democratic behavior. Just as gulags, mass murder, and
slavery mar the history of Marxist and democratic regimes respectively,
and urge us to distinguish behavior from ideological commitment, so Fas3
See the interesting account in Antonio Vinci, Prefigurazioni del fascismo (Milan:
CELUC Editrice, 1974), pp. 81–144.
4
This is, of course, the position assumed by Renzo De Felice. For De Felice, given the
uniqueness of the constellation of properties identified with the historic realities of Fascism,
there could be only one Fascism. See Renzo De Felice, Fascism: An Informal Introduction
to its Theory and Practice (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1976), chaps. 2 and
3. De Felice was chary of any attempts at historic or social science generalizations. See
A. James Gregor, “Autopsia di una intervista,” in Sei risposte a Renzo De Felice (Rome:
Volpe Editore, 1976), pp. 129–44.
CONCLUSIONS
249
cist behaviors must be distinguished from Fascism’s argued beliefs. Not
to recognize the differences between behavior and beliefs would be to
falsify reality.
To attempt to credibly relate doctrinal thought to behavior would be,
of course, a daunting task, requiring both rare skill in making distinctions
as well as employing reasonably sophisticated social science insights—
necessitating, moreover, access to an enormous fund of documentary and
trace evidence. It would require an encyclopedic grasp of a dense history
of events as well as impeccable understanding of human motives and personal deliberations.5
Acknowledging that, the present exposition attempts none of it. The
present effort is calculated to partially answer but one question: was Italian Fascism subtended by a reasonably coherent and relevant ideology,
composed of both rational normative and empirical convictions? To that
question, an answer has been conscientiously attempted. That has been
the relatively modest task of the present enterprise.
The obligation has been to provide a reasonably objective and accurate
account of the public thought of selected members of that class of thinkers
who legitimately might be counted among “Mussolini’s intellectuals.”
They have been allowed, in the measure possible in a work of this sort,
to speak for themselves.
Clearly, the class of intellectuals treated might have included others. Without question, it might have included Curzio Malaparte and Roberto Michels.6 It might have included A. O. Olivetti—and probably Edmondo
Rossoni—among a number of others. The decision to limit the number
of intellectuals considered was governed almost exclusively by the limitations of space and energy. Should others have been encompassed, their
addition would not have significantly altered the outcome, or changed the
argument in any significant measure—but would accomplish little more
than increase the bulk of the exposition. The account provided above has
gone into sufficient detail, by appeal to primary sources, to make the case
that Italian Fascism was animated by a rationale that its authors imagined
rendered its behaviors both comprehensible and moral.
The narrative provided is intended to serve cognitive ends. By pretending that Mussolini’s regime found support in nothing other than irra5
The person who has come closest to that accomplishment was Renzo De Felice in his
massive biography of Mussolini. He did not spend much time on an account or an analysis
of Fascist thought.
6
I have elsewhere briefly reviewed the voluminous works of Michels in an introductory
essay to selections from his works in A. James Gregor, ed., Roberto Michels e l’ideologia
del fascismo (Rome: Volpe, 1979), pp. 5–69; and Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999), chaps. 3 and 4.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
tionality and violence, some contemporary commentators have delivered
only a parody of Fascist thought. They have left us bereft of any real
understanding of one of the major revolutions of our immediate past.
That not only affects our comprehension of the past, but may very well
impair our understanding of the revolutions in our future. To imagine
that the Fascism of the twentieth century was inspired and vindicated by
an appeal to simple violence, and hatred is not only a fiction—but may
very well be a significantly misleading fiction as well.
As a case in point, the number of Fascist intellectuals who advocated
war, violence, and hatred for their own sake were both few and marginal.7
As we have seen, Julius Evola, who might conceivably be counted among
them8—was not a “fascist” thinker in any meaningful sense of the term.
He himself, both implicitly and explicitly, rejected such a characterization.9 That he remains identified as a fascist thinker by many contemporary commentators tells us more about contemporary discussions than it
does about Fascism.
A better candidate for the role of a Fascist advocate of violence for its
own sake might be Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, born in Alexandria, Egypt,
on 22 December 1876—the founder of Futurism, the radical artistic
movement that provided color to the world of art at the turn of the twentieth century. Marinetti early married his movement to Mussolini’s Fascism—and, if nothing else, the presence of Futurists in the ranks certainly
contributed to the political theater of the period. Irrepressibly given to
hyperbole, very little Marinetti or the Futurists said or did was either
measured or reasonable in any conventional sense.
When Marinetti founded Futurism in 1909, he called for “incendiary
violence” that might drive Italy and Italians out of the “fetid somnolence”
of dolce far niente. He incited Futurists and their allies to the destruction
of museums, monuments, and universities—to decimate everything that
7
See the account in Zeev Sternhell (with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri), The Birth
of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994), particularly the “Epilogue,” pp. 233–58.
8
Even that is debatable. Inner Traditions Publishers, purveyors of “New Age” thought,
have insisted that none of that is true concerning Evola—and they may very well be correct.
See H. T. Hansen, “A Short Introduction to Julius Evola,” in Evola, Revolt against the
Modern World (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 1995), pp. ix–xxii; and “Julius Evola’s Political Endeavors,” in Evola, Men among the Ruins: Post-war Reflections of
a Radical Traditionalist (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002), pp. 1–106.
9
In his response to the charge that he “glorified Fascist ideas,” Evola maintained that
such was never his concern. “I have defended,” he correctly affirmed, “and I still defend,
’fascist ideas,’ not inasmuch as they are ’fascist’ but in the measure that they revive ideas
superior and anterior to Fascism.” Evola, in effect, was never a “fascist” thinker. He identified himself as a “radical traditionalist,” rejecting all the political ideas not those of GrecoRoman and medieval antiquity.
CONCLUSIONS
251
“stank of the past.” He cried out for a New Italy, one alive with massive
engines of production, commerce, and travel; he spoke of aircraft filling
the skies with the thunder of their motors, of automobiles challenging
space with “eternal and omnipresent velocity,” and of steamships, like
sharpened steel, slicing across far horizons. He spoke of the tall smokestacks of factories piercing the clouds, and of electricity sparking life into
inanimate matter.10 All this was suffused with aggression and violence,
with an appeal to slaps and blows, to culminate in an invocation to what
he called the “beauty of battle,” and the “hygiene of war.”11
Marinetti and his followers rejected everything featured in the “old
Italy,” the Italy of literary ruminations, of meaningless and ineffectual
parliamentary rule, of tour guides, ruins, and amorous preoccupations.
Futurists spoke of vast economic and industrial development, of trade
schools, and of training engineers, chemists, and mechanics. They spoke
of rapidity of movement, of intuition rather than lucubration.12 What that
required, they insisted, was agitation, provocation, a rejection of tradition
and rules, and, ultimately, violence.
By the end of the First World War, the images of death and violence, of
bravery and commitment, were common fare among the survivors of the
trenches, where hundreds of thousands of young men had faced brutal
death and experienced the exhilaration of victory. The Futurists themselves had fought, and many had died. For them, the talk of violence and
victory took on an emphatic and immediate quality.
Marinetti imagined himself the spokesman for all these men—and for
an emergent Italy for which they had fought. He spoke of an Italy that
was youthful, self-confident, assertive, and energetic, indifferent to dusty
history and nostalgia about the glories of ancient Rome. He was the advocate of energy, of Italy’s entry into the competitive world of the industrialized and industrializing twentieth century—a century of arms and armaments—to earn its place among the advanced nations of the world
through enterprise, the assumption of risk, and a commitment to personal
responsibility.13
10
There are many anthologies of Futurist writings, both by Marinetti and his followers,
that speak to all these elements of Futurist thought. Among the better is Luciano De Maria,
ed., Marinetti e il Futurismo (Verona: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1973).
11
F. T. Marinetti, “Fondazione e Manifesto del futurismo,” Figaro, 20 February 1909,
in Luigi Scrivo, ed., Sintesi del Futurismo: Storia e documenti (Rome: Mario Bulzoni Editore, 1968), pp. 2–3.
12
Marinetti, “Contro Firenze e Roma, piaghe purulente della nostra penisola,” “Contro
l’amore e il parlamentarismo,” “Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista,” and “Programma politico futurista,” in Scrivo, Sintesi del Futurismo, pp. 23, 24, 53, 86.
13
Even before the First World War, Marinetti had spoken of the requirements of grandeur, of earning a place among the advanced industrial nations, in “Contro la Spagna passatista,” Prometeo, June 1911, in Scrivo, Sintesi del Futurismo, pp. 38–39, where he spoke of
252
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On the surface, all of this was generally compatible with the political
intentions of the first Fascism as it emerged from its founding meeting in
the Piazza San Sepolcro in March 1919. At that time, Marinetti duly
brought his followers into the movement.
More than that, and in many ways, Futurism was compatible with the
revolutionary movements of the time. In Russia, the Futurists, bringing
their appeals to violence and war, identified with the revolutionary Bolsheviks.14 In fact, the appeal to violence did not really distinguish Futurism,
nor Fascism, in any absolute sense.15 Revolutionary syndicalists and Lenin’s Bolsheviks were all convinced of the strategic and tactical necessity
of revolutionary violence. The entire atmosphere of the time crackled with
appeals to violence, warfare, and bloodshed. Revolutionary Marxists, no
less than Futurists or syndicalists, invoked violence without hesitation.
V. I. Lenin not only conceived violence a necessary revolutionary weapon;
his prose was filled with the language of warfare, battles, and violence.
In 1918, Lenin affirmed, without hesitation, that Marxist revolution required “revolutionary violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie
and the latter’s destruction. . . . The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence . . . unrestricted
by any laws.”16
There seemed to be, however, an enthusiasm for the employment of
violence in Marinetti’s effusive prose that was not readily to be found in
the prose of Lenin or many other revolutionary theorists. That having
been said, it seems equally apparent that a similar enthusiasm is not to be
found among the major spokesmen of national syndicalism and Fascism.
It certainly was not found in Sergio Panunzio’s volume, written about
the same time, devoted to a “theory of violence”—in which he builds
upon the distinction urged by Georges Sorel between conservative force
defense of the Fatherland, a strong military, and the possibility of achieving international
stature through victorious war.
14
See Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968). In “Al di là del comunismo,” Marinetti was pleased that the
Russian Futurists had identified with Lenin’s Bolshevism. Marinetti, “Al di là del comunismo,” in Teoria e invenzione futurista: Manifesti, scritti politici, romanzi, parole in libertà
(Verona: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1968), p. 418.
15
This was not only true during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Mao Zedong
did not conceal his enthusiasm for war and violence. He was convinced that “only with
guns can the whole world be transformed.” He went on to argue that “some people ridicule
us as advocates of the ’omnipotence of war.’ Yes,” he went on, “we are advocates of the
omnipotence of revolutionary war; that is good, not bad, it is Marxism.” Mao Zedong,
“Problems of War and Strategy,” Selected Works (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965–
1967), vol. 2, p. 225.
16
V. I. Lenin, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” Collected Works
(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), vol. 28, pp. 236, 242–43.
CONCLUSIONS
253
and innovative violence, the first embodied in the coercive power of the
establishment and the latter providing the transformative power of revolutionary energy.17
There is little readiness to invoke violence for its own sake in Panunzio’s
studied exposition. In the course of revolution, he maintained, violence is
notable, organized, physical resistance to the force of the established state.
It becomes necessary only when certain conditions render it absolutely
unavoidable—and, he continued, its proper objects are never innocents.
As a consequence, Panunzio drew a consistent distinction between carefully calculated revolutionary violence and the thoughtless and immoral
appeal to political terror. For Panunzio, violence must always be ethical,
serving the higher ends of justice—terror was a blunt weapon that was
not only immoral, because directed against the innocent, but ineffectual
as well, because it was, more frequently than not, counterproductive.18
Given such an analysis, it seems evident, in retrospect, that Fascism
could not domesticate Futurism. Futurism and Futurists were essentially
anarchic in disposition, and antinomian by conviction. They were devoted, as they insisted, to the “dignity and liberty of the individual”19—
and that seemed to mean that one was not required to obey prevailing
law nor submit to convention. There was more than a suggestion that
Marinetti’s political ideals included an individualism predicated on an
undefined conception of unconstrained “total liberty.”20 Equally evident
was the fact that whatever the compatibility of its call to rapid economic
growth and industrialization of the Italian peninsula, and its insistence
that the nation win a place at the table of the “Great Powers,” Futurism
would have more than a little difficulty accommodating itself to the authoritarian rigors of Mussolini’s Fascism.21
Even before the March on Rome that brought Fascism to power,
Mussolini directly addressed the issue of political violence. At the very
beginning of 1921, Mussolini insisted that “for Fascists, violence is not
a caprice. . . . It is not art for art’s sake. It is understood to be a surgical
necessity. A doleful necessity. . . . For us, violence is an exception, not a
17
Sergio Panunzio, Diritto, forza e violenza: Lineamenti di una teoria della violenza (Bologna: Licinio Cappeli-Librio Editore, 1921).
18
Ibid., pp. 40–44, 46 n.1, 55–56, 131–34.
19
Ibid., p. 39; see “La pittura Futurista: Manifesto tecnico,” in Scrivo, Sintesi del Futurismo, p. 13.
20
Luciano De Maria, “Marinetti poeta e ideologo,” in Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione
futurista, p. xxviii.
21
Futurism was to have the same difficulty with Lenin’s Bolsheviks. By the late 1920s,
few Futurists remained active in the Soviet Union, and certainly none were permitted to
represent the thought of the Communist party.
254
CHAPTER ELEVEN
method, or a system. For us, violence . . . is part of our defense of the
nation.”22
In April of the same year, Mussolini reaffirmed the differences between
the views of Fascism and those of Futurism in terms of political violence.
There was no mistaking the intent of his speech. In the course of his
delivery, he obliquely referred to the Futurists by acknowledging their
objections to “pastists” (passatisti)—those whose vision is fixed exclusively on the past. At the same time, Mussolini made evident his differences with Futurists by insisting that the Rome of antiquity, which they
rejected, was the normative model for the emerging, modern Italy—and
by repeating his rejection of any violence that was avoidable, stupid, or
lacking in chivalry.23
By that time, it was clear that Futurism and Fascism would part political company. It was not a simple question of their different conceptions
of violence that determined the rupture. Marinetti and the Futurists had
published a “Program Manifesto of the Futurist Political Party” in September 1918, in which they called not only for an industrial Italy sovereign over its own future in its own space, but for unrestricted universal
suffrage, the socialization of land, the unbridled freedom of workers to
strike, the rejection of organized religion, and the substitution of only one
commanding faith: that of “the Italy of tomorrow.”24
In 1920, Marinetti had published his “Al di là del comunismo,” in
which he affirmed his continued commitment to one or another form of
anarchic individualism.25 He continued to insist on his antimonarchism
and his anticlericalism—postures that an expanding Fascism found increasingly difficult to accommodate.
By the time of the Second Congress of the Fasci in Milan, in May 1920,
Marinetti, and his immediate lieutenants, resigned from the political leadership of the Fasci di combattimento and remained alienated until 1924.
Whatever the reconciliation that followed at that time, Marinetti never
became a member of the Partito nazionale fascista.26 Thereafter, Marinetti
absented himself entirely from any doctrinal concern with Fascism.
22
Mussolini, “In tema di violenza,” in Oo, vol. 16, pp. 181–82.
Mussolini, “Discorso di Bologna,” in Oo, vol. 16, pp. 239–46.
24
“Manifesto-programma del Partito politico futurista (settembre 1918),” in Renzo De
Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 1885–1920 (Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1965), pp.
738–41.
25
In the course of the exposition, Marinetti affirmed that the kind of individualism he
advocated was actually “the maximum extension of the individual, a greater individual.”
See F. T. Marinetti, “Al di là del comunismo,” in Teoria e invenzione futurista, p. 412.
26
See F. T. Marinetti, Futurismo e fascismo (Foligno: Franco Campitelli Editors, 1924).
The Fascist party was formally established at the end of 1920. Marinetti never joined. See
Carlo Fabrizio Carli, “Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Destini italiani, artisti in RSI,” in Fabio
23
CONCLUSIONS
255
After 1924, Marinetti occupied himself exclusively with literary activity. He remained steadfast in his loyalty to Mussolini until the very end
of the Fascist experiment, but he was not to publicly address specifically
ideological issues ever again.27 He exercized some literary and artistic influence over Fascist Italy, he served with considerable courage in its wars,
but he did not ever influence the development of its formal ideology.
Given all that, it is very difficult to cite Futurist notions concerning
violence and its employment as evidence of Fascism’s unqualified commitment to its use—to the exclusion of thought and morality. Like the
thought of Julius Evola, the thought of F. T. Marinetti had very little to
do with the formal ideology of Fascism. Fascism, like any revolutionary
ideology of the twentieth century, sought a moral and empirical rationale
for its undertakings and legitimation for its rule.
The failure to understand that has produced a woeful tendency in some
contemporary discussions to identify fascist thought with any and every
notion found indefensible by contemporary sentiments of “political correctness.” Thus, anyone whose views are, in any fashion, antiintellectual,
antihumane, antifeminist, and antidemocratic—sadistic, insensitive, homicidal, xenophobic, racist, genocidal, psychopathic, “totalitarian,” and
lacking in charity—is identified as a fascist thinker. That inevitably leads
to the extravagance of identifying soccer thugs, members of the Ku Klux
Klan, as well as all and sundry sociopaths and terrorists—together with
their lunatic advocates and apologists—as fascist thinkers. All of which
must strike one not only as silly, but intellectually privative as well.
More productive of consequence is the treatment of Fascist thought
as a time- and circumstance-specific historic product—as informed by a
rationale composed of relatively distinctive themes: (1) the felt need to
restore a humiliated and diminished community to its “appropriate” historic station; together with (2) the conviction that, in our own time, the
politically defined nation serves as such a community; and (3) only
through restoration and renewal might the nation provide for the “selfactualization” of its denizens; and finally, (4) that instrumental to all that
is the availability of a “strong state,” a state capable of decisively commanding all the human and material resources of the developing community understood to be facing challenge.
Given that, there are relatively informal “entailments” that follow: (1)
to achieve its ends, the nation must be capable of not only defending
itself, but projecting its power into what is understood to be a threatening
Andriola, Uomini e scelte della RSI: I protagonisti della Repubblica di Mussolini (Bastogi:
Editrice italiano, 2000), p. 225.
27
See the account in Luciano De Maria, “Marinetti poeta e ideologo,” in Marinetti,
Teoria e invenzione futurista, pp. xxxiv–xliv.
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
international environment as well; (2) to achieve those capabilities would
necessitate the rapid expansion and maturation of its economic power, in
general, and its industrial base, in particular; and that (3) in order to
achieve such ends, it is conceived necessary to diminish what are generally
held to be individual political and civil rights, so that the behavior of all
taken together would be “single-willed” or “totalitarian,” heroic, committed and sacrificial—prerequisites to the accomplishment of the revolution’s omnibus purpose.
Such a catalog of primary and derivative descriptive criterial traits is
composed of both normative and empirical elements. Some are more fundamental, while others are understood to be derivative and instrumental.
Among the body of elements, that which serves as primary could only be
the unproblematic normative enjoinment that each of us seek to “fulfill
oneself as a human being” (sii uomo). Fascist thinkers occupied with fundamental philosophical and essentially ethical questions held that community and its fullness were absolutely essential to the achievement of
that end.28 How the fullness of community was understood, how that
fullness was achieved, and how all that affected the realization of self
were not only normative, but analytic as well as empirical issues. Granted
that, the public doctrine becomes a function of still further and increasingly complex derivations that require definitional and empirical grounds
for their support.
It cannot be our purpose here to pursue an analytic reduction of Fascist
doctrine. More to our purpose is the provision of a criterial list of properties that might help us to appreciate what Fascist thought was not. For
one thing, it is manifest that Fascist thought was not fundamentally irrational nor intrinsically inhumane. Whatever irrationality or inhumanity
was advocated was generally held to be instrumental to other ends—
sharing much the character that such advocacy does in non-Fascist environs. Where some one or another Fascist advocated violence and inhumanity for their own sake, he would qualify, among Fascists as well as
non-Fascists—then, as now—not as an apologist of the system, but as
either incompetent to deal with normative and empirical issues and/or
clinically disturbed.29
28
“Within the soul of man there is a still small voice that is never silent, and will not let
him rest, but incessantly spurs him onward. Onward toward what end? Toward himself—
toward the ideal self that he ought to be. . . . In seeking to define the moral law . . . I expressed it as strictly as possible in the admonition: Be man.” Giovanni Gentile, Genesi e
struttura della società: Saggio di filosofia pratica (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1946), pp. 7–8,
44; see chap. 2, para. 2.
29
Gentile and Gentileans regularly abjured anti-Semites and biological racists with just
such dismissals. See A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2001), chap. 8.
CONCLUSIONS
257
There is very little in the historic Fascist doctrine produced by academicians and social scientists that might so qualify. Much, if not most, of the
most execrable elements in Fascist doctrine were episodic, contingent, and
instrumental—as they tend to be in any revolutionary system. A similar
case can be made for the enormities that have stained the history of alternative revolutionary systems—whatever their respective ideologies. The
massacre of Kulaks and the Great Terror under Stalin and the horrors of
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong qualify as
illustrative cases.
Fascist anti-Semitism, for example, however despicable, was recognized even by the most intransigent Fascists as a contingent, rather than
an essential, component of doctrine—often administered with uneasy
conscience.30 There was little pretense in any serious Fascist literature that
anti-Semitism was central to Fascist convictions.31 True anti-Semites, in
fact, were rare among Fascist thinkers.32 Paolo Orano’s Gli Ebrei in Italia,
typical of much of Fascist literature on the subject, was an account of
what was held to be the empirical circumstances that made anti-Semitism
30
In this respect, there is an entire library of literature that attests to the differences between Fascist and National Socialist anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism defined Hitler’s National
Socialism, and mass murder was the inevitable consequence of holding the view that whatever disabilities were attributed to the Jews were biological and unalterable. None of that
was the case with Fascist anti-Semitism. See the entire discussion in De Felice’s Storia degli
ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1993) and the discussion and the sources in
Gregor, Giovanni Gentile, chap. 8. Not only had Fascist Italy provided qualified protection
to Italian Jews from their National Socialist oppressors, but even when the situation had so
radically changed that Mussolini had few opportunities left to defy Hitler, the Fascists of
the Republic of Salò, identified anti-Semitism as a contingency, attendant upon the war then
in process. See “The Program Manifesto of the Fascist Republican Party,” in A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press,
1969), p. 387, para. 7. Consult, in this context, the account provided by Giorgio Israel and
Pietro Nastasi, Scienza e razza nell’Italia fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998). Rehearsing
the coarse stupidities and unspeakable violations of human decency that were the consequences of Fascist anti-Semitism serves little purpose—any more than recounting the human
degradations and needless suffering that accompanied the institution of black slavery tells
us much about the belief system of North American democracy.
31
The defense of such a claim would require a detailed assessment of apologetic Fascist
literature, particularly that which appeared in the most scurilous state-sponsored publications like La difesa della razza that commenced publication about the time of the publication of the “Fascist Racial Manifesto” in 1938, when Mussolini had wedded Fascism’s future to that of National Socialist Germany. All of that must be put into context. See Gregor,
The Ideology of Fascism, chap. 6 and appendix A.
32
Giovanni Preziosi was among the very few Fascists who were committed anti-Semites.
He was almost always considered a marginal person among Fascists until Mussolini’s abject
dependence on National Socialist Germany provided him tactical advantage among those
who disdained him. See the discussion in De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, pp. 446–63.
258
CHAPTER ELEVEN
an apposite response to political contingencies.33 As Fascist Italy became
increasingly dependent on National Socialist Germany, its anti-Semitism,
which formally appeared for the first time in 1938, became correspondingly insistent and morally objectionable.34 For established Fascist thinkers the entire issue was more than problematic.
Whatever it became, Fascist anti-Semitism was never a question of biological determinism among those who spoke most authoritatively.35 Unlike National Socialist theoreticians, the issues of race and anti-Semitism
never became one involving genetic determinism for Fascist intellectuals—a notion violative of every principle of Fascist idealism. Like the antiSemitism of the Soviet Union, anti-Semitism in Fascist Italy never became
an inextricable component of its doctrine.36 It was a tactical posture
largely dictated by the association with Hitler’s Germany.
For almost all major Fascist thinkers, any flirtation with biological determinism and anti-Semitism remained, at best, marginal. Whenever such
elements surfaced, they can easily be traced to contingencies, precipitated
by historic and political circumstance.37 There was never doctrinal substance that might provide them vindication.
As such, Fascist arguments never provided a rationale for the mass murder of members of the Jewish community.38 Racism never succeeded in
33
Paolo Orano, Gli Ebrei in Italia (Rome: Casa Editrice “Pinciana,” 1938).
In August 1938, the journal La Difesa della razza appeared. It contained material that
emphasized biological determinants of behavior, assessments that conflicted with what had
been standard Fascist judgments concerning human responsibility. Few, if any, major Fascist
intellectuals contributed to its pages, and when they did, it was to qualify the biological
determinism prevalent. The anti-Semitism in its pages was of the vilest sort and found scant
support among established Fascist intellectuals.
35
Even among the most culpable, such as Roberto Farinacci, the argument against the
Jews was not predicated on biological determinism. It was grounded in what were taken to
be the anti-Fascist postures of Jewish organizations or on the alleged wickedness of Talmudic counsel concerning treatment of non-Jews. None of this constituted a rationale for mass
murder. See Roberto Farinacci, “La Chiesa e gli Ebrei,” “I non Ebrei e il Talmud,” and “La
Francia e gli Ebrei,” in Realtà storiche (Cremona: Società Editoriale, 1939), pp. 81–169.
See the account in Roberto Maiocchi, Scienza italiana e razzismo fascista (Florence: La
Nuova Italia, 1999), pp. 187–210.
36
Fascist anti-Semitism was exorbitantly expensive for Italy as it was to be for the Soviet
Union (not to speak of National Socialist Germany). See the discussion on Fascist Italy in
Israel and Nastasi, Scienza e razza nell’Italia fascista and that concerning the Soviet Union,
in Gennadi Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti-Semitism in Stalin’s Russia (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1995); and Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin against the Jews (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
37
See the discussion in Sergio Panunzio, Teoria generale dello stato fascista, 2nd enlarged
ed. (Padua: CEDAM, 1939) paras. 6 and 12.
38
The logic of the National Socialist argument apparently took the following form: the
Jewish deficits (whatever they were imagined to be) were biological and fixed. In order to
34
CONCLUSIONS
259
supplanting the principal elements of Fascist doctrine. Unlike National
Socialism, biological determinism and anti-Semitism remained transient
and indigestible constituents of Fascist doctrine. That any such racism
and anti-Semitism should survive as definitive of Fascist thought is, at
best, unpersuasive. However offensive to moral sensibilities both the Fascist racism and anti-Semitism that did influence political behavior might
be, they never took on the determinate doctrinal properties featured in
National Socialism.39
As intimation of its essential respectability, much of the rest of Fascist
thought, disaggregated into its components, has by and large passed into
contemporary thought. Giovanni Gentile’s “anti-intellectualism” and his
notions of a self-generative collective and transcendental consciousness,
for example, have been represented as a “positive existentialism” and an
“absolute humanism,” comparable to the European existentialism that
became popular after the Second World War.40 Further, not a few of Gentile’s ideas resurface in the “postmodernism” of contemporary “social
constructivism”—in which an external material reality, independent of
consciousness, is treated as nothing more than a useful fiction.41
Beyond that, Ugo Spirito, who survived the Second World War, went
on to bring Gentile’s ideas forward into postwar Europe as a “neo-idealism” that he identified as a “new humanism.”42 Like many other formerly
Fascist thinkers, Spirito carried what were essentially Fascist ideas into
the new Europe that emerged after the war. After the destruction of the
Italian Fascism they had so long served, for example, Camillo Pellizzi
and Luigi Fontanelli continued to advocate a new form of national syndicalism, and an attendant “viable corporativism,” to serve a postwar
“new man” who, after Italy’s defeat in the Second World War, might
expunge the deleterious worldwide effects of those disabilities, one would have to physically
expunge the “race.” That argument was apparently held to be the vindication for genocide.
Such an argument rarely, if ever, appeared in the public statements of any Fascist thinker.
Even the writings of Giovanni Preziosi, the most committed of anti-Semites in Italy, never
rested on the grounds that the “Jewish problem” was of biological origin. See the discussion
in Aldo A. Mola, “Giovanni Preziosi,” in Fabio Andriola, ed., Uomini e scelte della RSI,
pp. 157–78.
39
Fascism became complicit in the murder of Jews when the Fascist Black Brigades
rounded up Jews and allowed German SS units to take them for what was, in effect, murder.
About seven thousand Jews perished under those circumstances.
40
See Vito A. Bellezza, L’Esistenzialismo positivo di Giovanni Gentile (Florence: G. C.
Sansoni Editore, 1954).
41
See A. James Gregor, Metascience and Politics: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Language of Political Science (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2003), Postscript.
42
See Ugo Spirito, Nuovo umanesimo (Rome: Armando Armando Editore, 1964); see the
commentary, Roberto Mazzetti, Quale umanesimo? Ipotesi su Croce, Gentile, Ugo Spirito,
Mussolini (Rome: Armando Armando Editore, 1966).
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bring the nation back from “the abyss” of disillusion, corruption, and
abject failure.43
For years after the end of the Second World War, “corporativism,” in
one form or another, continued to be a matter of serious reflection.44 Of
the constellation of themes that together provided Fascism its substance,
nationalism, and irredentism—of one or another variety—resurfaced
in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and in South, Southeast and East Asia,
after the Second World War—and have remained influential, and probably will continue to influence events in the future. For at least some of
these reasons, some have seen “fascism” reappearing in less-developed,
reactive nationalist communities pursuing programs of rapid economic,
industrial, and technological growth under authoritarian and singleparty auspices.45
Out of all this, several defensible propositions seem to emerge: (1) Most
of the central doctrinal convictions of Fascism were largely inoffensive in
their simple affirmation. (2) Taken together, however, the ideas are, on
their face and in fact, rather more irrelevant than offensive to modern
Europeans, North Americans and Japanese. There are few, if any, nations
in the European Union, for example, that conceive themselves oppressed,
and held inferior by their neighbors. The nations that harbored such sentiments before the Second World War are now among the wealthiest and
most dynamic of the Union. In those circumstances it would seem very
unlikely that thematic Fascism would find a place anywhere in the Union
or among industrially advanced democracies.
The evidence seems to suggest that all the themes that characterize interwar Fascism are all but completely irrelevant to Europe, North
43
See Camillo Pellizzi, La tecnica come classe dirigente (Rome: Libreria Frattina Editrice,
n.d., but probably 1963) and Luigi Fontanelli, “Per un nuovo ruolo del sindacato,” as appendix to Pellizzi, La tecnica come classe dirigente, pp. 71–104. See the more ample discussion of Pellizzi’s postwar position in Danilo Breschi and Gisella Longo, Camillo Pellizzi: La
ricerca delle elites tra politica e sociologia (Soveria Mannelli’s Rubbettino Editore, 2003),
pp. 235–54.
44
In reformist China, the Communist party has fostered the growth of a “corporatist”
structure for the economy. See the discussion in Bruce J. Dickson, Red Capitalists in China:
The Party, Private Entrepreneurs, and Prospects for Political Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 23–26. More than that, “corporativism” remained a
matter of discussion in Italy and elsewhere after the passing of Fascism. See, for example,
the publications of the Istituto di studi corporativi in Rome, particularly works like Gaetano
Rasi, La società corporativa: Partecipazione programmazione (Rome: Istituto di studi corporativi, 1973), 2 vols., and Raffaele Delfino, Programmazione corporativa (Rome: Volpe,
1967). In the 1970s, Fedrick B. Pike and Thomas Stritch, eds., spoke of The New Corporatism: Social-Political Structures in the Iberian World (Notre Dame: The University of Notre
Dame Press, 1974).
45
See the discussion in A. James Gregor, A Place in the Sun: Marxism and Fascism in
China’s Long Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000).
CONCLUSIONS
261
America, and Japan after the developments that followed the termination
of the Second World War. Reactive nationalism no longer appears to find
a place among them. Irredentism no longer seems to command the passions it did during the interwar years. Economic and industrial development no longer generate the commitment they once did, in those environs,
three-quarters of a century ago. For Europeans, political authoritarianism
and dictatorship elicits little of the favor it did in the 1920s and early
1930s. As a consequence, none of the real or imagined “fascisms” of the
interwar years have resurfaced with any credibility in any nation of the
European Union. Even the most successful, the “neofascism” of the Italian Movimento sociale italiano, was largely Fascist in name only. While
the initial phases of the Movement were large with nostalgia, with Fascist
songs, and the presence of Fascist paraphernalia, there was very little,
if anything, like a Fascist program. Whatever Fascism there was in the
Movement was the product of the presence of survivors of the Fascist
republic of Salò.46
Once all of that is understood, one easily comprehends why the Movement gradually shed most of the identifiable features of interwar Fascism
until, in the 1990s, it entirely abjured “totalitarianism” in any form, and
explicitly denounced any expression of racism. The reality is that Fascism
no longer appears to constitute an issue for contemporary Italians, in
particular, or Europeans in general.
What commentators almost invariably identify as “fascist” activity in
contemporary Europe is the product of individual and group activity that
advocates, or engages in, violence against immigrants and/or Jews—and/
or which denies the reality of the mass murder of Jews during the Second
World War—and/or trashes graveyards and/or supports Arab fundamentalists in their opposition to Israel and the West.47 To call such posturing
“fascist” might be useful in mobilizing sentiment in day-to-day political
contest, but it hardly tells us much about historic Fascism—and prepares
us even less for any cognate fascisms that might appear in the future.
It seems very unlikely that entertaining and/or disseminating any peculiar constellation of ideas might re-create “fascism” in Europe. Like all
revolutions, Fascism was the product of an array of historical circumstances that in their specifics can never appear again. Nonetheless, that
46
See the informed discussion in Ludovico Garruccio (Ludovico Incisa di Camerana),
“Fascismo, Pseudofascismo e MSI,” La Discussione 19 (1035), 4 (November 1971), reprinted in Ludovico Incisa di Camerana, Fascismo, Populismo, Modernizzazione (Rome:
Antonio Pellicani Editore, 1999), pp. 135–41.
47
See the account in Glyn Ford, ed., Fascist Europe. The Rise of Racism and Xenophobia
(London: Pluto, 1992). The confusion arises out of the fact that many in the radical European left support the Palestinian resistance against Israel, probably for reasons having nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
262
CHAPTER ELEVEN
there will be revolutions in the future, and that they may take on some
of the traits we have associated with Mussolini’s Fascism can hardly be
gainsaid. That those traits, together with the historic conditions that generated them, might foster the re-creation of features of Fascism that
proved exceedingly dangerous, is equally possible. That possibility recommends that we equip ourselves to recognize the traits and the conditions that evoke and sustain them. As has been suggested, that cannot be
an easy task.
Index
Actualism: and Carta del lavoro, 117;
Ideas in: collectivity, 141; democracy,
107; economy, 116, 139, 141; elite,
120; freedom, 122; history, 124, 125;
human beings, 124; humanism, 161,
168; immanence, 161; individual, 97,
124, 141; individual and community,
113, 128; individual identification with
state, 154; interaction with others, 98;
liberalism, 97, 126, 141; morality, 124,
141; nationalism, 141; national syndicalism, 109; objectivity, 124, 126; parliament, 141; politics, 141; positivism,
123–25, 126; profound self, 96; race,
189, 190, 194, 195; religion, 125, 167–
68; sacrifice, 153; science, 123–25, 126;
self, 109; self-actualization, 96–97, 98;
self-realization, 109; society, 141; spirituality, 168; state, 141; subjectivity,
124; syndicalism, 85; transcendence,
161, 167; truth, 93; will, 146; In relation to: Costamagna, 168, 188; Evola,
196, 220; Farinacci, 168; Fascism, 86,
88, 97, 98, 99, 133; Mussolini, 86, 98,
110, 137, 168–69; Orano, 168; Panunzio, 83, 86, 88, 89, 141, 142, 150, 152,
159, 161–62; Pellizzi, 167, 168, 172,
176, 177, 243; Roman Catholic
Church, 160–61, 167–68; Spirito, 92,
93, 94, 97, 99, 109, 111, 133, 236. See
also Fascism; Gentile, Giovanni
actualization. See self
Africa, 139, 191, 223
agencies, intermediate, 118. See
institutions
agriculture/agrarian population, 12, 20–
21, 45, 56, 99, 105, 228
Albertine Constitution, 88
Alfieri, Vittorio, 22
anti-Comintern pact, 139
anti-Semitism: in Costamagna, 189–90; in
Evola, 200–201, 212, 219, 221, 225–
26; in Fascism, 193, 194, 211, 212,
217, 220, 257–59, 261–62; in Hitler,
215, 257n; in law, 216; in Mussolini,
193, 215; in National Socialism, 217,
257n, 259; in Preziosi, 226. See also
Jews; race
Ardigo, Roberto, 62, 69
aristocracy: and Associazione nazionalista
italiano, 34, 49; government by, 27;
landed, 44; as leader of masses, 32; in
Olivetti, 52; in Panunzio, 66, 76, 88; in
Papini, 27; in Pellizzi, 172, 173, 174,
176; productive, 49; squadristi as, 166;
workers as, 242. See also elite
Aristotle, 113
Aryans/Aryanism, 187, 188, 200, 201,
202, 203, 206, 207, 211, 214, 215,
216, 218
Assembly of the National Council of Corporations, 240
associations/organizations: employer, 130,
173; and Great Depression, 137; in Mussolini, 90; private for production, 117;
single for production, 237, 238; and
state, 90, 118; of workers, 35, 76, 108,
130. See also corporations
Associazione nazionalista italiano (ANI),
49, 56, 89; aristocracy in, 34, 49; corporativism in, 98; Corradini’s domination
of, 41; in Costamagna, 189; democracy
in, 41; economy in, 49; education in, 49;
elite in, 49; first congress of, 35, 38, 40;
and Gentile, 91; industry in, 34, 49, 50;
and List, 48; Marxism in, 50; and Panunzio, 89; production in, 50; proletariat in,
50; revolution in, 50; and Rocco, 42,
43; and Roman Catholic Church, 58–
59; second congress of, 40; socialism in,
50; society in, 50; state in, 58; and syndicalism, 57
Austria, 193
Austria-Hungary, 77, 78
autarky, 135n, 140, 170
authoritarianism: contemporary relevance
of, 261; in corporativism, 175; and democracy, 150; in Evola, 210; in Italian
Nationalist Association, 58; in List, 46;
in Panunzio, 73, 86, 176; in Rocco, 51
264
authority, 240; of law, 77; in Panunzio, 70,
71, 73, 74–76, 75, 77; in Pellizzi, 170; of
state, 75
Avanguardia socialista, 66
Axis powers, 180
Bacon, Francis, 92
Badoglio, Pietro, 223, 224, 244
Balbo, Italo, 149
Baldazzi, Giovanni, 53
Balkans, 184
Bedouins, 47
Belgium, 24
Bergson, Henri, 54, 90, 92
Berkeley, George, 92
Bernstein, Eduard, 61
Blanqui, August, 53
Bolshevism, 9; economic and industrial failures of, 100, 102, 104; in Evola, 198; in
Panunzio, 155, 156, 157; in Pellizzi,
243; sources of support for, 21; in Spirito, 134, 135, 239; state-controlled
economy in, 101; violence in, 252. See
also Soviet Union
Bombacci, Nicola, 228, 229, 244
Bombrini, Alberto Maria, 59
Bottai, Giuseppe, 135
Bradley, F. H., 92
Camera dei Fasci e delle corporaziani,
La, 174
Cantimori, Delio, 186
capitalism: in Bernstein, 61; in Corridoni,
56–57; in Engels, 63; and Fascism, 1, 7,
13, 18–19; and fascism, 5–6, 8; Gramsci
on, 10, 11; in Italy, 6; Marx on, 6–7; in
Marxism, 6; middle class in, 6, 7; in Mussolini, 104, 140; in Panunzio, 69–70;
profit in, 12–13, 18; and revolution, 18;
in Rocco, 44; and socialism, 50; in Spirito, 131, 238–39
Caracciola, Nicola, 216
Carta del lavoro, La, 108, 110, 111, 117,
130, 132, 140, 150, 233, 234, 237. See
also workers
Central Corporative Committee. See Comitato corporativo centrale
Chamberlain, H. S., 204
Cione, Edmondo, 228, 244
Civilità fascista, 165, 242
civilization, 65, 176, 177, 184, 188, 246
INDEX
class: in corporativism, 128; in Corradini,
27, 31, 33, 34; in Fascism, 89, 128;
Gramsci on, 10; individual identification
with, 39, 55; in Italian Social Republic,
232; in Marxism, 27, 68–69; in nationalism, 36; in Panunzio, 68–69, 72, 78,
156, 157; in socialism, 25; state as mediator of interests in, 53; in syndicalism,
32, 36, 55
class conflict: in Corradini, 33, 49; in Fascism, 128; in Gumplowicz, 67, 68; and
industry, 128; in Marxism, 27, 28, 63,
67; in Panunzio, 66, 67, 68, 72, 145; in
Pellizzi, 167; in Sorel, 65, 66, 68
Clauss, Ludwig Ferdinand, 207–8
Colajanni, Napoleone, 62
collective/collectivity: in Actualism, 141; in
Corradini, 39; democracy in, 58; and
economy, 118, 132; in Fascism, 89, 97,
99; in Fontanelli, 240; in Gentile, 86, 87,
96, 110, 112, 122–23, 171; harmony in,
121; List on, 46; in Mussolini, 136; in
nationalism, 38, 41; in Panunzio, 67, 68,
73, 90, 103, 141; and personhood, 87;
in Rocco, 43; sacrifice for, 122; in Spirito, 110; in syndicalism, 55; totalitarian, 87. See also community; corporativism; society
colonialism, 25, 41, 139, 177, 191–92. See
also expansionism; imperialism
Comitato corporativo centrale (Central
Corporative Committee), 162, 173, 174
Committee of Eighteen, 108
community: in Actualism, 113, 128; from
association of similars, 39; choice in,
116; common destiny of, 74; in Corradini, 27–28, 39; of destiny, 39, 129; and
economy, 132; in Fascism, 255, 256; in
Gentile, 114; and individual, 116, 127,
153; individual identification with, 79,
109, 122, 147; individual as protected
from, 128; individual sacrifice to, 154;
as individual’s core, 114; law in, 74; and
leader, 122; in Mussolini, 137; nation
and, 255; in nationalism, 38, 39; in Panunzio, 71–72, 74, 75, 76, 79, 151; right
reason in, 116; in syndicalism, 31, 32;
syndicates in, 123. See also collective/collectivity; society
Confederation generale du Travail, 81
confederations, 129, 130, 237
Confederazione dell’industria, 237
INDEX
Confederazione del sindacati industriali,
236–37
Confederazione generale dellavoro, della
tecnica e delle arti (General Confederation of Labor, Technology and the
Arts), 232
consciousness, 94, 95–96, 259
consensus, 122, 176
Consiglio nazionale delle corporazioni
(National Council of Corporations),
130, 162
consumption, 44
corporations: in Fascism, 128–29; labor
and employer organizations as, 130; in
Mussolini, 90; in Spirito, 132–33; as
state organ, 133; in totalitarian state,
134; workers as stockholders in, 132–
33. See also associations/organizations
corporativism: in Associazione nazionalista italiano, 98; authoritarianism in,
175; and Carta del lavoro, 233; class in,
128; consultative institutions of, 169–
70, 173, 175; control by, 140; in Corradini, 35; duality in production system
of, 236, 238; economy in, 116, 117,
128, 173–74, 175, 233, 237; in Evola,
197, 201; as failure, 175; in Fascism,
97, 99, 239; Ferrara conference on, 133,
134, 135, 136, 140, 232, 236; in Fontanelli, 240, 241, 243, 259–60; and general will, 123; in Gentile, 113, 235, 236,
244; hierarchy in, 175; and hierarchy of
organized labor, 134; individual in, 117;
individual as adversary in, 128; and industry, 59, 175, 233; institutions of,
113, 123, 169–70, 173, 174, 231, 232,
240; integral, 131, 134, 139, 237, 239,
240, 241; in Italian Social Republic,
231, 232; and law, 113, 130, 175; manager in, 239; in Mussolini, 110, 111n,
131, 136, 140, 149n, 225, 233, 244;
and owners, 232; in Panunzio, 73, 76,
79, 141, 142, 143, 173, 174, 176; in Pellizzi, 165, 169, 170–71, 173, 242–43,
259–60; in Rocco, 59–60; and Roman
Catholic Church, 59; and science, 134;
and socialism, 134; in Spirito, 98, 111,
112–13, 116, 119, 129, 130, 131–36,
140, 141, 142, 237, 238, 239, 241; and
state, 35, 59–60, 110, 123, 170; syndicates in, 175; in Volpicelli, 119; workers
in, 59, 134, 232, 238, 239. See also col-
265
lective/collectivity; Consiglio nazionale
delle corporazioni (National Council of
Corporations)
Corradini, Enrico: and domination of
Associazione nazionalista italiano,
41; and first nationalist congress, 35;
Ideas on: class, 31, 33, 34; collectivism,
39; community, 27–28, 39; corporativism, 35; democracy, 30–31, 32, 41;
economy, 29, 48, 49; elite, 32; heroes,
32; history, 29, 48, 49; human beings,
29; imperialism, 48, 48–49; individual,
153; industry, 41, 49; leaders, 32; liberalism, 49; masses, 30; military, 49; modernity, 33; nation, 31–32, 49; nationalism, 25–26, 27, 30, 37, 39, 41, 108;
national syndicalism, 36, 83; parliament, 30–31, 32, 49; plutocracy, 33–34;
production, 32, 48, 48–49; proletariat,
27, 33; revolution, 27, 32; socialism,
28; soldier-producer, 34; state, 153; syndicalism, 28, 29, 30, 31–32, 37, 57;
workers, 31, 33; World War I, 49; In
relation to: Corridoni, 57; Gentile,
85; List, 48, 49; Marxism, 27, 28, 29;
Olivetti, 54; Orano, 54; Rocco, 42, 48,
49, 57; Sorel, 28; Valli, 38
Corridoni, Filippo, 56–57, 58, 101
Costamagna, Carlo, 168, 186–88, 189–90,
220
Council of Eighteen, 188
Croce, Benedetto, 26, 75, 82, 91
crowd. See masses
culture: and Associazione nazionalista italiano, 34; in Costamagna, 187; in Evola,
201, 202, 203; Fascist, 165–66; foreign,
42–43; in Gentile, 86, 236; and international survival, 40; Italian inferiority in,
25; in List, 46; in Panunzio, 79; in
Rocco, 43; of workers, 236, 239
custom, 74
Cyrenaica, 35
Davanzati, Roberto Forges, 37
De Felice, Renzo, 220, 248n
De Man, Henri, 17
democracy: abandonment of, 58; in Actualism, 107; and Associazione nazionalista italiano, 41; authoritarian, 150; and
authoritarianism, 150; in collectives, 58;
consensus in, 122; in Corradini, 30–31,
32, 41; elite manipulation of, 120; in
266
democracy (cont’d)
Engels, 63; in Evola, 198; and Fascism,
8, 15, 107, 121, 171; in Futurism, 107;
general will in, 121; in Gentile, 119–20,
122, 171, 172; individual in, 41, 58, 97;
in Italian Socialist party, 61; and liberalism, 41; masses in, 120; in Mussolini,
100, 107; and nationalism, 36, 40, 41,
58; in Panunzio, 72, 176; in Papini, 27;
in Pellizzi, 171; representative, 120; in
Rocco, 43, 58, 60; in Sighele, 40; and socialism, 41, 63; in Sorel, 64, 65; in syndicalism, 36, 107; totalitarian, 119–20; in
Valli, 40; in Western thought, 120
De’Stefani, Alberto, 102
determinism, 54, 82, 95, 124
dictatorship, 155, 261. See also leader/
leadership
Dopolavoro, 162
Dovere nazionale, Il, 59
Eastern Europe, 184
economy: in Actualism, 116, 139, 141; administrators in, 132; and Associazione
nazionalista italiano, 34, 49; atomistic individuality in, 116; Bolshevik failures in,
100, 102, 104; in Bombacci, 230; and
capital resources, 44; and collectivity,
118, 132; and community, 132; competitiveness in, 41, 46, 48, 50; corporativist,
116, 117, 128, 173–74, 175, 233, 237;
in Corradini, 29, 48, 49; in Corridoni,
101; demand in, 44; development of, 26,
43, 45, 100, 104, 175, 247; distribution
of material benefits in, 20, 41, 44–45,
50, 58; in Fascism, 12–13, 14, 21, 89,
97, 101, 103, 105–6, 111, 113, 116,
128, 163, 239, 256; in Fontanelli, 243;
free enterprise in, 100, 116–17; free market, 104; in Gentile, 107; and human beings, 132; industrial, 19–20; intermediate agencies in, 118; international, 40,
129, 163, 170, 236; in Italian Social Republic, 230–31; of Italy, 21–25, 100,
104, 175; and law, 69; liberal policy in,
105–6, 116, 123, 126, 131–32, 139,
153, 238, 239; in List, 43–44, 45–46;
market-based, 103, 104; in Marx, 70; in
Marxism, 19–20; in Mussolini, 13, 100–
101, 102, 104, 107, 129, 136–37, 178,
191–92, 193, 228, 229, 245; national,
135; in nationalism, 26, 59, 247; in Pa-
INDEX
nunzio, 69, 72, 74, 75, 80, 103, 104,
141, 143, 157, 176; in Pareto, 102, 103,
126, 127; in Pellizzi, 170, 242, 243;
planned, 238; plutocratic domination of,
33–34; post–World War II, 13; private
initiative in, 116, 117; private property
in, 103; private vs. public in, 117; programmatic, 134–35; regulated, 134–35;
representation in, 173, 174, 175; retrograde, 243; and revolution, 20, 56; in
Rocco, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 51, 103, 153;
in Schmitt, 182; in socialism, 50; socialization of, 228, 230, 231, 232, 244, 245;
in Sorel, 70; Soviet, 100, 102, 243; in
Spirito, 107, 109, 116–17, 123, 126,
127, 130–36, 139, 236, 238, 239; and
state, 100–101, 170; state control of,
101, 106, 107, 108, 110, 117, 129, 132,
138, 139, 140; and state corporativism,
117; state interference in, 100; stockholders in, 132–33; in syndicalism, 101, 128;
in Volpicelli, 107; worker governance of,
232–34; and World War I, 5
education, 40, 49, 74, 119, 121, 122, 141,
154, 156, 166, 167, 173, 241
Educazione fascista, 165, 177
elections, 59, 120–21, 146. See also democracy; representation
elite: in Actualism, 120; in Associazione
nazionalista italiano, 49; and consensus,
121; in Corradini, 32; in democracy,
120; in Gentile, 123; government by,
121; from Italian Socialist party, 32; leadership of, 32, 80, 121; from Marxism,
32; and middle class, 32; and morality,
149; in Mosca, 120; in Mussolini, 100;
and nationalism, 32, 36, 38; in Panunzio, 66, 74, 80, 148–49, 176; in Pareto,
120; in Pellizzi, 173; revolutionary, 121;
rotation of, 32, 121; rule by, 123; in syndicalism, 32, 36; and threat, 121–22;
and will, 149; workers as, 242. See also
aristocracy
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 30
emigration, 25, 27, 33, 40, 42
empire. See imperialism
empiricism, 71, 74, 75, 87, 92, 94, 95, 97,
125. See also science
Enciclopedia italiana, 162
Engels, Friedrich, 46, 47–48, 52, 61, 63,
67, 157
Enlightenment, 2, 8
INDEX
enterprise, 133; free, 100, 116–17. See
also economy
enterprise council, 231
entrepreneur, 35, 44, 60, 79, 131
epistemocracy, 27
epistemology: in Evola, 195; in Gentile, 94;
in Mussolini, 212; in Spirito, 92, 93, 94.
See also knowledge; thinking
Ethiopia, 25, 139, 170, 192
ethnicity, 188, 189. See also race
Europe, 23, 24, 42, 43
Evola, Julius, viii, 16, 133n, 158n, 195–
207, 208–11, 212, 217–21, 222, 228,
255; Fundamentals of Fascist Race Theory, 211; Heidnischer Imperialismus,
200–201, 202; Imperialismo pagano,
196, 199, 200–201, 202; Il mito del
sangue, 204; Rivolta contra il mondo
moderno, 202–3, 204; Sintesi di dottrina
della razza, 204–5, 211, 212, 217–18
expansionism, 41, 42, 46, 47–48, 163,
177, 178–79. See also colonialism;
imperialism
Farinacci, Roberto, 168, 219, 220, 227–
28, 258n
Fasci di combattimento, 10, 254
fascio interventionista, 77
Fascism: basis for, 2; and birthrate, 105; in
Bombacci, 230; changing views of, vii—
viii, 1–17; in contemporary thought,
259–61; as contradictory, 6, 7; culture
of, 165–66; doctrinal coherence of, 111;
as ecclesiastic, 141; economic growth
under, 14; and employer organizations,
130; end of, 245, 246; as enemy of West,
2; evil of, 8, 15; as extremist, 3, 4, 198;
and finance capitalists, 12; foreign policy
of, 101, 163, 165, 177, 184, 256; and
Great Depression, 137, 163; historical
context of, 261–62; ideology of, 5, 9,
12, 14–15, 83–84, 149, 249; and industrial capitalism, 5–6, 7; and industrialists, 12; and infrastructure, 105; as inhumane, 256; institutions of, 111, 155,
163, 165; intermediate agencies of, 118;
as irrational, 1–2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 16,
198, 249–50, 256; Italy controlled by,
99, 106, 155; and labor organizations,
130; and landholders, 12; and Matteotti
murder, 98, 106; in Movimento socialista italiano, 261; and National Social-
267
ism, 2, 4, 179–80, 193, 195, 217, 220,
258, 259; and nation’s general interests,
105; as progressive, 14, 15; and proletarian revolution, 1, 7; and proletariat, 14;
and “Protection of Motherhood and Infancy” program, 105; rational programs
of, 19; as regime, 98; restoration of,
224–30; and right-wing politics, 3, 4,
15, 16; rural population in, 12, 105;
sources of support for, 21; spheres of influence in, 184; squadristi of, 166, 197;
and state socialism, 170; support for,
106; themes of, 255–56; and thought vs.
behavior, 248–49; as transitional regime,
106; and urban middle class, 12; and
urban population, 105; and Victor Emmanuel III, 224, 225; and World War II,
224; Ideas in: Actualism, 86, 88, 97, 98,
99, 133; agriculture, 105; antihumanism, 198; anti-Semitism, 193, 194,
211, 212, 217, 220, 257–59, 261–62;
civilization, 184; class, 89, 128; class
struggle, 128; collectivity, 89, 97, 99;
community, 255, 256; corporations,
128; corporativism, 97, 99, 239; democracy, 8, 15, 107, 121, 171; economic liberalism, 105–6, 113, 239; economy, 12–
13, 14, 21, 89, 97, 100, 101, 103, 111,
113, 116, 128, 163, 256; education,
141; epistemarchy, 141–42; expansionism, 163, 177; general will, 121; imperialism, 184; individual, 89, 97, 256;
industry, 108, 111; irredentism, 13, 261;
Jews, 214, 216, 217, 220; land reclamation, 105; law, 111, 154–55; leadership,
142, 150; living space, 184; military, 13,
101, 105, 106; modernization, 108; morality, 4, 256; mysticism, 2, 205, 213; nation, 90, 255; nationalism, 35, 61, 99;
nation-state, 89; parliament, 107; police,
101; pragmatism, 92; private property,
113; production, 12–14, 111, 128; psychology, 212; race, 185–90, 193–95,
200, 211, 211–12, 213, 214–17, 225–
26, 257–59; science, 212; self-actualization, 255; self-realization, 256; single
party rule, 142; state, 99, 100, 101, 255;
syndicalism, 99, 170; syndicalism and nationalism unified, 61; technology, 12, 13;
totalitarianism, 84, 97, 99, 107, 256; violence, 3, 8, 15, 17, 89, 141, 250–52,
253, 256; virtue, 141; war, 89; workers,
268
Fascism (cont’d)
105; In relation to: Bergson, 92; capitalism, 1, 7, 13, 18–19; Enlightenment, 2,
8; Evola, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201,
202, 204, 210, 211, 219, 255; Futurism,
255; Gentile, 171, 172, 227; Gramsci, 5,
6; Hegel, 153; Lenin, 93; Marxism, 1, 5,
6–17, 19, 21; Mussolini, 1n, 137; Pantaleoni, 102, 103; Panunzio, 66, 83, 86,
154–55, 158–59; Pareto, 102–3; Pellizzi,
176, 242–43; Roman Catholic Church,
160; Schmitt, 183; Spirito, 91–92, 132,
238. See also Actualism
fascism, 1n, 4, 5–6, 8, 18n
Fascist Grand Council, 106
Fascist Labor Charter. See Carta del lavoro, La
Fascist Republican Party, 229
Fascist Social Republic. See Repubblica
sociale italiano
Ferraris, Dante, 59
finance capitalism, 12, 13, 18, 18n, 20
Finelettrica (electricity), 138
Finmare (shipbuilding), 138
Finmeccanica (mechanical industries), 138
Finsider (iron and steel), 138
Fontanelli, Luigi, 236, 240, 241, 244n,
259–60
France, 24, 28, 35, 42, 56, 63–64, 77,
191, 192
freedom, 76, 116, 122
free market, 45, 102
free trade, 44, 45, 101
French Revolution, 2, 8, 23
future, 66, 69, 70, 76
Futurism, 19, 83, 107, 227, 250, 251, 252,
253, 254, 255
General Confederation of Labor, Technology and the Arts, 232
Gentile, Giovanni: and Civilità fascista,
165; and constitution, 107–8; contribution of, 17; Discorsi di religione, 235;
and Educazione fascista, 165, 177; and
Istituto nazionale di cultura fascista,
165–66; and Italy, 86; and “National
Fascist Institute of Culture,” 165; preamble to Dottrina del fascismo, 119–20,
133, 152, 160, 241; and Roman Catholic Church, 133, 167, 168, 169, 188;
and World War I, 91; Ideas on: activity,
96; categories, 95; collectivity, 86, 87,
INDEX
96, 110, 112, 122–23, 171; community,
114; consciousness, 94, 96, 259; corporativism, 113, 235, 236, 244; culture,
86, 236; democracy, 119–20, 122, 171,
172; economy, 107; education, 166, 167;
elite, 123; empiricism, 87; epistemology,
94; ethnicity, 189; experience, 159; history, 167, 189; humanism, 160, 235,
259; idealism, 87, 94, 96, 188; immanence, 159, 167; imperialism, 189; individual, 86, 87, 96, 97, 109, 112, 114,
152; industry, 86; intellectuals, 94; jurisprudence, 88; knowledge, 94, 159; law,
87, 88; leader, 87, 122–23, 149; liberalism, 97; materialism, 94, 189; morality,
88, 94, 96, 114, 159, 189, 242; nationalism, 37, 85, 86, 91; nationality, 189; nature, 94; object, 94, 159; objectivity, 94;
ontology, 94; personhood, 87; politics,
87; production, 242; race, 185n, 188,
189, 194, 226; religion, 159–60, 167;
representation, 87; self, 55, 87, 96–97,
109, 147, 152, 171; socialism, 235; spirituality, 86, 94, 96, 98, 176, 189; state,
86–87, 99, 152, 171, 176, 189; subject,
94, 159; syndicalism, 85, 86, 91; thinking, 94, 96, 115; totalitarianism, 87,
110, 247; transcendental self, 147; truth,
94; universality, 87; will, 86, 87, 146;
workers, 86, 98, 235, 235–36, 242; In relation to: Corradini, 85; Costamagna,
188, 189; Croce, 91; Evola, 133n, 196,
219–20; existentialism, 259; Fascism,
171, 172, 227; Hegel, 88; Kant, 87, 88,
94; Marx, 244; Mussolini, 54, 55, 88,
133, 241; neo-Hegelianism, 83; Olivetti,
235; Panunzio, 15, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87,
142, 150, 152, 159, 161, 162, 235; Pellizzi, 167, 172, 241, 243; Rocco, 85;
Rousseau, 147; Spirito, 90, 91, 92, 93,
94, 110, 111, 238, 239, 259. See also
Actualism
Gentile, Panfilo, 51–52
German Social Democratic party, 61–62
Germany, 137; and Austria, 193; expansionism of, 42; and industry, 19, 24; and
Italian socialism, 24; and Italy, 77, 139,
179–80, 183, 186, 191, 192–93, 195,
213–14, 222, 224, 228–29, 244, 258;
and Mussolini, 218, 221, 226; nationalism in, 56; oversight of production in,
244–45; in Panunzio, 78, 79; in Pellizzi,
INDEX
176; race in, 185, 187, 218, 225; in
Schmitt, 182; and Spain, 192; and Turkey, 35. See also National Socialism
Gini, Corrado, 105
Gioberti, Vincenzo, 26, 152, 161; Del primato morale e civile degli italiani, 23,
152
Giolitti, Giovanni, 10
Gobineau, Joseph Arthur de, 204
Gramsci, Antonio, 5, 6, 10–11
Gran consiglio (Grand Council of Fascism), 107, 138, 139, 162, 174, 223,
227
Grandi, Dino, 223
Great Britain, 24, 35, 42, 46, 47, 70, 77,
176, 191, 192, 223
Great Depression, 18, 129, 130, 137, 163,
231, 233
Green, J. H., 92
group, real vs. artificial, 72. See also community; society
Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 37, 67, 69, 79,
82, 90, 124, 212; Die sociologische
Staatsidee, 67
Günther, Hans F. K., 204
Hegel, G.W.F.: and Fascism, 153; in Gentile, 88; individual in, 97, 133, 153; and
Marx, 244; and Panunzio, 74, 86, 90,
141, 148, 151, 152, 162; and Rousseau,
147; self in, 97; state in, 133. See also
neo-Hegelianism
heroes, 30, 32, 65, 66, 172, 210. See also
aristocracy; elite; leaders; warriorproducer
history: in Actualism, 124, 125; in Corradini, 29, 48, 49; in Corridoni, 57; in
Evola, 198, 200, 201, 202–3, 209–10;
and Fascism, 261–62; in Gentile, 167,
189; of human beings, 39; leaders in, 30;
in Marx, 62, 63, 69; in Olivetti, 36; in
Panunzio, 69, 73, 78, 79, 82, 149, 151,
152, 154, 155; in Papini, 26–27; in Pellizzi, 172; in Rocco, 48, 49, 51; in
Schmitt, 182; in Sorel, 65
Hitler, Adolf: anti-Semitism in, 215, 257n;
and Evola, 199; and Mussolini, 192–93,
222n, 223, 224–25, 226, 228; and Panunzio, 158; race in, 158, 185, 214,
225. See also National Socialism
human beings: in Actualism, 124, 141; in
Corradini, 29; and economy, 132; in
269
Evola, 205, 210; evolution of, 39; as
group animals, 30; history of, 39; and
immutable laws, 37; in Kant, 76; in
Marx, 36; in Mussolini, 212–13; in nationalism, 30, 31; in Olivetti, 36; in Panunzio, 71, 75, 82, 141; and science, 53;
and society, 124; society as immanent in,
141; in Sorel, 65, 82; in Spirito, 93, 124;
in syndicalism, 30, 31
humanism, 160, 161, 168, 198, 209,
235, 259
Hume, David, 92
Hyperboreans, 201, 202, 203, 206,
207, 210
idealism, 54; absolute, 94; as antiindividual, 87; and Costamagna, 188; critical,
81, 90; in Evola, 195; in Gentile, 87, 94,
96, 188; in Missiroli, 55; in Mussolini,
55, 83n; in Panunzio, 74, 76, 81, 82, 90,
151, 152, 161, 162; in Pellizzi, 176; in
Spirito, 92, 94, 238
Idea Nazionale, 37
imperialism: and Associazione nazionalista
italiano, 34; in Corradini, 48–49; in Corridoni, 57; European, 24; in Evola, 205;
and Fascism, 184; in Gentile, 189; and
Italy, 183; in Mussolini, 184; and nationalism, 178; in Panunzio, 144; in Pellizzi,
176, 177, 179, 184; in Rocco, 48; in
Schmitt, 180, 194–95. See also colonialism; expansionism
individual: in Actualism, 97, 113, 124,
128, 141; atomistic, 116, 124, 125–26;
as autonomous, 114; civil rights of, 43;
class identified with, 39, 55; and community, 116, 127, 128, 153, 154; community as core of, 114; community identified with, 79, 109, 122, 147; and
corporativism, 117, 128; in Corradini,
153; in democracy, 41, 58, 97; in economy, 116; and education, 154; equality
before law, 148; in Fascism, 89, 97, 256;
freedom of, 116; in Gentile, 55, 86, 87,
96, 97, 109, 112, 114, 152; in Hegel,
97, 133, 153; in idealism, 87; and law,
87; in liberalism, 97, 113, 123, 124,
125–26, 127, 131–32; in List, 46; in Marinetti, 253; in Mazzini, 23; in Missiroli,
55; moral perfection of, 154; in Mussolini, 55, 90, 136, 137; in nationalism,
50, 98; nation identified with, 55, 149;
270
individual (cont’d)
in Panunzio, 72, 76, 77, 82, 83, 86, 90,
141, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 174; in
Pareto, 126–27; in Pellizzi, 171; profit
by, 136; as reality, 112; and right reason,
116; rights of, 43, 77, 148; in Rocco, 43,
44, 153; in Rousseau, 146, 147; sacrifice
of, 153, 154; self-realization in, 55, 109,
141; socialization of, 154; and society,
126; as solitary, 114; in Sorel, 65; in Spirito, 109, 123, 127, 238, 239; and state,
127, 152, 153, 174; as state adversary,
127; state as core of, 114; state defense
of, 112, 114, 148; state identified with,
55, 86, 98, 112, 113, 116, 128, 129,
131, 133, 134, 136, 149, 154, 238; in
syndicalism, 39, 55, 58, 98; thinking of,
115; in totalitarianism, 97; in Western
thought, 112; and worker bias, 132.
See also self
industrial associations, 59, 108
industrialists, 12, 59, 99
industrialization, 45, 110, 243, 261
industrial revolution, 46, 47
industry: and Associazione nazionalista italiano, 34, 49, 50; in Bernstein, 61; and
Bolshevism, 100; in Bombacci, 230; and
class struggle, 128; competitiveness of,
41, 46, 48, 50; and corporativism, 59,
175, 233; in Corradini, 41, 49; in Corridoni, 56–57, 101; and democracy, 58; development of, 33–35, 43, 44, 46, 49, 50,
100, 175, 177–78; in economic liberalism, 239; and economy, 19–20; and
expansionism, 177, 178–79; and fascism, 5; in Fascism, 108, 111; in Gentile,
86; in Germany, 24; Italian, 18–19, 20,
33–35, 50, 100, 175; in List, 45, 46;
manager in, 232, 233, 238; in Marxism,
19–20; in Missiroli, 55; and modernity,
19; in Mussolini, 7, 55, 110, 140, 178,
229; in nationalism, 41; and national survival, 39–40; in Panunzio, 72, 76, 143;
Papini on, 27; in Pareto, 103; in Pellizzi,
170, 172; raw material for, 27, 177,
178–79; in Rocco, 42, 43, 44, 45, 49,
50, 51; sacrifice of, 50; in socialism, 50;
socialization of, 228; in Sorel, 64; and
state, 54; state control of, 110, 138, 140;
in syndicalism, 52, 56, 247; tariff protection for, 24, 40; and urbanization, 105.
See also economy; technology
INDEX
infrastructure, 44, 45, 46, 105
Institute of Management and Finance. See
Istituto di gestione e finanziamento
institutions: corporativist, 113, 123, 169–
70, 173, 174, 231, 232; Fascist, 111,
155, 163, 165; of integral corporativism,
240; in Italian Social Republic, 231, 232
intellectuals, 64–65, 94
internationalism, socialist, 37, 40
international relations: competition in, 40,
48, 55; and Fascism, 101, 163, 165,
177, 184, 256; and Italy, 21–22, 33, 37,
42, 42–43, 110, 165, 172; in Missiroli,
55; and Mussolini, 55, 110, 234; and nationalism, 56; in Valli, 39
irredentism, 13, 41, 261
Istituto di gestione e finanziamento
(Institute of Management and Finance),
230, 231
Istituto di riconstruzione industriale (IRI),
137–38, 230–31
Istituto mobiliare italiano (IMI), 137,
138, 230
Istituto nazionale di cultura fascista (National Institute of Fascist Culture), 165–
66, 169, 179, 241
Italian Nationalist Association. See Associazione nazionalista italiano (ANI)
Italian Radical party, 42
Italian Socialist party, 19, 24, 28, 32, 61
Italian Social Republic. See Repubblica
sociale italiano
Italy: and Africa, 191, 223; as agrarian,
20–21, 56; and Austria-Hungary, 77;
and Balkans, 184; capitalism in, 6; colonialism of, 25, 191–92; competitiveness
of, 50; Corridoni on, 101; development
of, 42, 57, 104; and Eastern Europe,
184; economic development of, 21–25,
100, 104, 175; emigration from, 25, 27,
33, 40, 42; and Ethiopia, 25, 139, 170,
192; exploitation of, 21–22; extended
space for, 183; flawed national consciousness of, 40; foreign culture in, 42–43,
172; foreign domination of, 21–22, 33;
foreign investment in, 42; foreign policy
of, 165; and foreign relations, 37, 110;
and France, 35, 77; in Gentile, 86; and
Germany, 77, 139, 179–80, 183, 186,
191, 192–93, 195, 213–14, 222, 224,
228–29, 244, 258; and Great Britain,
77; and Great Depression, 129, 138; and
INDEX
imperialism, 183; importance of, 20, 22,
24–25, 26, 32, 33, 35, 104, 166–67,
172, 175, 178; independence of, 172; industrialization of, 18–19, 20, 33–35, 50,
100, 175; liberal government of, 24; List
on, 46; living space for, 183, 185; in Marinetti, 250–51; material resources of,
42; modernization of, 19; Mussolini’s
control of, 99, 106, 109, 155; nationalism in, 23, 24–25, 36; in Panunzio, 79,
104, 175; in Pellizzi, 166–67, 172, 174,
176; and plutocracies, 37; population of,
105; rebirth of, 22; regeneration of, 174,
176; resources of, 191; as retrograde,
14, 20, 35, 56, 57, 86, 97, 104; and Risorgimento, 23–24, 34; in Rocco, 42;
and Russia, 21, 77; sealines of, 178; and
Spain, 192; state control of, 138; technology in, 19; Vico on, 22; and war in
Libya, 58; and war in Tripoli, 54, 55,
77; and war with Turkey, 35–36, 40;
and World War I, 5, 77; and World War
II, 176, 179, 183, 195, 222, 224
Japan, 139, 192
Jews: in Costamagna, 189–90; in Evola,
200–201, 207, 208, 218; in Fascism,
214, 216, 217, 220; in Italian-German
meetings, 193; mass murder of, 216,
217, 226, 258; in Mussolini, 217; in
National Socialism, 220. See also antiSemitism; race
Jouhaux, Leon, 81
Kant, Immanuel, 92; in Gentile, 87, 88, 94;
in Panunzio, 74, 75, 76, 77, 82, 83, 90,
141, 145; in Spirito, 94
knowledge: in Evola, 204, 208; in Gentile,
94, 159; in Spirito, 92, 94. See also epistemology; thinking
labor. See workers
Labor Charter of 1927. See Carta del lavoro, La
Labor Courts, 128, 130
Labriola, Arturo, 36, 66, 69
laissez-faire, 44
landholders, 12, 99
land reclamation, 105, 138
language, 115–16, 117
Lapouge, Georges Vacher de, 204
Lateran Accords, 160, 199
271
law: anti-Semitism in, 216; authority of,
77; basic syndical, 130; as collective will,
79; in community, 74; and corporativism, 113, 130, 175; and economy, 69; on
employer organizations, 130; equality before, 148; extended space in, 180; in Fascism, 111, 154–55; force as origin of,
69; in Gentile, 87, 88; and hegemony,
182; and human condition, 71; and individual, 87, 148; international, 180, 181,
182, 183; in Italian Social Republic,
231; Monroe Doctrine in, 181; as moral,
87; in nationalism, 86; natural, 77, 124;
in Panunzio, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73–76, 77,
79, 82, 83, 143, 145, 154–55; race in,
216; and society, 69, 70, 71; in Sorel, 70,
82; and state, 75, 76, 112; as utilitarian,
75; violence and, 73–74; and worker organizations, 130
Lazzei, Gerolamo, 54
leader/leadership: and community, 122;
in Corradini, 32; by dictator, 155, 261;
by elite, 32, 80, 121; embodied in one
person, 149, 171; in Evola, 201, 202;
in Fascism, 142, 150; in Fontanelli, 243;
in Gentile, 87, 122–23, 149; hierarchy
of, 122; in history, 30; in Marx, 36;
of masses, 32, 80, 148; in Mussolini,
107; Mussolini as, 88; in nationalism,
36; in Olivetti, 36; in Panunzio, 80,
148, 155; in Pellizzi, 170, 171, 172–73;
and popular opinion, 123; and psychology of masses, 30; and racial homogeneity, 188; in Schmitt, 185; selection of,
120, 173; subordination to, 107; in syndicalism, 32, 36; in totalitarianism, 149–
50; of workers, 36. See also aristocracy;
elite; heroes
Le Bon, Gustave, 37
Lenin, V. I., 9; and Fascism, 93; Marxism
in, 252; and New Economic Policy, 104;
and Spirito, 93n; state in, 9, 157; State
and Revolution, 157; violence in, 252
Leonardo, 25
Leopardi, Giacomo, 23, 26
Leyers, Hans, 244–45
liberalism: abandonment of, 58; in Actualism, 97, 126, 141; in Corradini, 49; in
Corridoni, 101; and democracy, 41; disintegration of, 86; economic, 105–6,
116, 123, 126, 131–32, 139, 153, 238,
239; failures of, 41, 49–50; in Fascism,
272
liberalism (cont’d)
105–6, 113, 239; in Gentile, 97; individual in, 97, 113, 123, 124, 125–26, 127,
131–32; in Italian government, 24; in
Italian Nationalist Association, 58; in
Italian Socialist party, 61; in List, 44, 46;
in Mussolini, 100, 136; in Panunzio, 86,
141, 176; in Pellizzi, 171; and positivism, 126, 127; in Rocco, 44, 49–50, 60,
153; and science, 123–24, 127; self in,
97; and socialism, 63; in Spirito, 109,
123, 126, 236, 238, 239
libertarianism, 64, 83, 90
Libya, 35, 58
List, Friedrich, 43–44, 45–46, 47, 48, 49
Locke, John, 92
Lombardo-Radice, Giuseppe, 54
Loria, Achille, 69
Ludwig, Emil, 193
Lupa, La, 35
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 21–22
Malaparte, Curzio, 92, 249; L’Europa
vivente, 247
manager, 232, 233, 238, 239, 243
“Manifesto of Fascist Racism,” 185, 194,
214–15. See also race
Maraviglia, Maurizio, 37
March on Rome, 21, 85, 90, 109, 130, 154
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 227, 250–52,
253, 254–55; “Al di la del comunismo,”
254; “Program Manifesto of the Futurist
Political Party,” 254
Marshall, Alfred, 67
Marx, Karl, 6; in Bernstein, 61; Communist
Manifesto, 36; economy in, 70; in Evola,
200; expansionism in, 46–47; and Gentile, 244; Great Britain in, 70; and Gumplowicz, 67; and Hegel, 244; history in,
62, 63, 69; human beings in, 36; on industrial capitalism, 6–7; as Jew, 200; leaders in, 36; and List, 44, 46–47; in Panunzio, 67, 69, 72, 82, 157; production in,
46; productivity in, 46; progress in, 47;
revolution in, 46; and Sorel, 65–66, 70;
and Spirito, 93n; and syndicalism, 52;
workers in, 70. See also socialism
Marxism: in Associazione nazionalista italiano, 50; in Bernstein, 61; capitalism in,
6; class in, 68–69; class conflict in, 27,
28, 63, 67; in Corradini, 27, 28, 29; in
Corridoni, 56; economy in, 19–20; elite
INDEX
from, 32; and Fascism, 1, 5, 6–17, 19,
21; industrial economy in, 19–20; international, 37; leadership of masses in, 30;
in Lenin, 252; in Mussolini, 19, 21, 53,
54, 55, 102; nationalism vs. social revolution in, 24; in Panunzio, 67, 68–69, 90,
104, 156, 158; positivism in, 29, 62; and
post–World War II economy, 13; proletariat in, 6, 10; revolution in, 6, 10, 20,
56; in Rocco, 37, 44–45; and science,
29; and science vs. myth, 69; and socialism, 24, 61; in Sorel, 17, 64, 65, 68–69;
in Spirito, 91; and state, 157; in syndicalism, 56; syndicalist abandonment of, 37.
See also socialism
masses, 29–30, 31, 32, 80, 120, 121,
148, 149
materialism: in Evola, 196, 198, 204, 205–
6, 210; in Gentile, 94, 189; in Mussolini,
54, 55, 192; in Panunzio, 156; in Pellizzi, 243; in Spirito, 93, 94, 95; in syndicalism, 86
Matteotti, Giacomo, 98–99, 106, 109
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 23–24, 26, 152, 161
Mazzinianism, 63
Mexico, 47
Mezzetti, Nazareno, 60
Michels, Roberto, 17, 249
middle class: and Associazione nazionalista
italiano, 34; in Bernstein, 61; in Corradini, 25; in Corridoni, 56–57; and elite,
32; and Fascism, 12; Gramsci on, 10; in
industrial capitalism, 6, 7; in Mussolini,
225, 228; in nationalism, 36; in Olivetti,
37; in Panunzio, 72, 73, 76, 79; in Papini, 26; proletarianization of, 6; revolutionaries as, 56; in Sorel, 64, 65
military: and Associazione nazionalista italiano, 34; in Corradini, 49; in Corridoni,
101; in Fascism, 13, 101, 105, 106; and
international survival, 40; in Mussolini,
193, 214, 226; in Panunzio, 66, 72, 156;
and Rocco, 49; in Sorel, 65; support for
Fascism, 106; in syndicalism, 55; in syndicalism vs. nationalism, 58; and World
War II, 222, 224
Ministry of Corporations, 173
Ministry of Corporative Economy, 232
Missiroli, Mario, 55
modernity, 19, 33, 76, 79
Monicelli, Tommaso, 37
Monroe Doctrine, 180–81, 182
INDEX
Montini, Giovanni Battista, 198
morality: in Actualism, 124, 141; and elite,
149; in Fascism, 4, 256; in Gentile, 88,
94, 96, 114, 159, 189, 242; identification in, 147; and individual, 154; and
law, 87; and nation, 146, 148; in nationalism, 37; in Olivetti, 37; in Panunzio,
69, 71, 72, 76, 82, 141, 145, 146, 147,
151, 162, 253; in Pellizzi, 167, 176, 242,
243; and perfection, 147, 151, 154; in
Rousseau, 147; in Sorel, 65, 82, 242; in
Spirito, 94, 95, 96; and state, 118; in syndicalism, 37; and universality, 87; and
will, 148, 149
Morocco, 35
Mosca, Gaetano, 27, 37, 67, 120
Movimento socialista italiano, 261
Mussolini, Benito, 2, 10; and Africa, 191;
arrested, 223, 224; and Assembly of the
National Council of Corporations, 240;
astuteness of, 99; and Carta del lavoro,
140, 233, 234; and Central Corporative
Committee, 163; and Concordat with
papacy, 160, 198; conflicting interests
surrounding, 99; Dottrina del fascismo,
119–20, 133, 150, 151, 152, 160, 241;
and Fascist Social Republic, 219, 228;
and foreign relations, 55, 110, 234; and
Germany, 218, 221, 226; and Gran consiglio, 162; and Great Depression, 129,
233; and Hitler, 192–93, 222n, 223,
224–25, 226, 228; ideological success
of, 12; and industrialists, 99; and landholders, 99; legacy of, 228, 229, 234; as
Manchestrian, 102; and Matteotti murder, 98–99, 109; and Il popolo d’Italia,
81; power of, 99, 106, 109, 155, 174,
228, 234; and “Protection of Motherhood and Infancy” program, 105; restoration of, 224–25, 226, 228–30; and
Roman Catholic Church, 160, 168–69,
198, 199, 218, 228; as ruler, 88; tactical
compromises of, 99–100; and Utopia,
53, 55; and Victor Emmanuel III, 226,
228; and World War I, 53–54; and
World War II, 13, 218; Ideas on: Actualism, 86, 98, 110, 137, 168–69; antiSemitism, 193, 215; associations, 90; autarky, 135n; authority, 240; Bolshevism’s failures, 100, 104; capitalism,
104, 140; collectivity, 136; colonialism,
139, 191–92; commune, 90; commu-
273
nity, 137; corporations, 90; corporativism, 110, 111n, 131, 136, 140, 149n,
225, 233, 244; democracy, 100, 107; determinism, 54; discipline, 110; economy, 13, 100–101, 102, 104, 107, 129,
136–37, 138, 139, 178, 191–92, 193,
228, 229, 245; education, 241; elite,
100; families in, 90; historical materialism, 192; idealism, 55, 83n; imperialism, 184; individual, 55, 90, 136, 137;
industry, 7, 55, 110, 140, 178, 229; international competition, 55; Jews, 217;
leaders, 107; liberalism, 100, 136;
living space, 183, 191; materialism, 54,
55, 192; middle class, 225, 228; military, 193, 214, 226; mysticism, 213; nation, 89, 90, 215; nationalism, 55; National Socialism, 211, 213–14; national
socialism, 54, 55; national syndicalism,
81; neo-Hegelianism, 55; parliament,
107; party, 137; plutocracy, 110, 214,
225, 233; positivism, 53; production,
100, 108, 136; property, 137, 229; race,
193, 211, 213–15, 218; revolution, 54,
55, 100, 102, 225, 226, 229, 230, 234,
241; Rome, 254; science, 53, 212, 213;
scientism, 83n; socialism, 53–54, 104,
241; socialization, 228, 232, 245; society, 229; spirituality, 55, 88n, 149n;
state, 55, 100, 110, 136, 137, 157; syndicalism, 99, 109; totalitarianism, 98,
107, 110, 137; violence, 253–54; will,
53, 193; workers, 12, 108, 109, 136,
193, 225, 229, 233–34; In relation to:
Baldazzi, 53; Blanqui, 53; Bombacci,
229; Evola, 197, 198, 199, 202, 211,
212, 217–18, 219; Fontanelli, 241; Futurism, 254; Gentile, 54, 55, 88, 133,
241; Gramsci, 6; Lazzei, 54; LombardoRadice, 54; Marxism, 19, 21, 53, 54,
55, 102; Missiroli, 55; Pantaleoni,
102; Panunzio, 77, 89; Pareto, 102;
Pellizzi, 167, 170, 171, 172, 241; Piccoli, 54; Rocco, 42; Sorel, 54; Spirito,
91, 131, 135–36, 137, 239, 240n, 244n;
Tasca, 54
mysticism, 2, 195, 202, 205, 213
myth, 65, 80, 82, 204, 208, 210
nation: collective mission of, 27; and community, 255; in Corradini, 27, 31–32,
32, 49; in Costamagna, 187; emerging,
274
nation (cont’d)
60; as ethical organism, 148; expansionism of, 47–48; as fascio nazionale,
78; in Fascism, 90, 105, 255; general interests of, 105; individual identification
with, 55, 149; and international relations, 31, 39; late-developing, 43, 44,
45; less developed, 45, 46, 56, 101; in
List, 44, 45–46; and morality, 146; in
Mussolini, 89, 90, 215; in Olivetti, 52,
80–81; in Panunzio, 78, 80, 89, 143,
146, 151, 157; in Pellizzi, 176, 177; plutocratic vs. proletariat, 33–34; and society, 144; in Sorel, 81; state as mediator
of interests in, 53; in syndicalism, 31–32,
55; in syndicalism vs. nationalism, 58;
unity of, 43, 51; Valli on, 39; workers’
governance of, 242
National Council of Corporations, 173–74
National Fascist Institute of Culture, 165
National Institute of Fascist Culture, 165–
66, 169, 179, 241
nationalism: in Actualism, 141; and Associazione nazionalista italiano, 34; class
in, 36; and collectivism, 38, 41; colonialism in, 177; community in, 38, 39; contemporary relevance of, 260, 261; and
corporative state, 59–60; in Corradini,
25–26, 27, 37, 39, 41, 108; in Corridoni, 58; in Costamagna, 189; in Croce,
26; democracy in, 36, 40, 41, 58; as developmental, 58; economic in, 26, 247;
economy in, 59; elite in, 32, 36; elite manipulation of, 38; equity in, 31; in Europe, 23; in Evola, 197, 198; expansionism of, 41; in Fascism, 35, 61, 99; in
France, 56; in Gentile, 37, 85, 86, 91; in
Germany, 56; human beings in, 30; and
imperialism, 178; individual in, 50, 98;
industry in, 41, 59; and international relations, 37, 40, 56; in Italy, 23, 24–25,
36; in Jouhaux, 81; justice in, 31; law in,
86; and Lazzei, 54; leaders of, 36; and
Lombardo-Radice, 54; masses in, 31; in
Mazzini, 23–24; middle class in, 36; military in, 58; morality in, 37; in Mussolini,
54, 55; nation in, 58; in Olivetti, 37, 54,
58, 85; in Orano, 54, 58, 85; in Panunzio, 80, 83, 85, 90, 108, 141; in Papini,
26–27; parliament in, 32, 36, 41, 58; in
Pellizzi, 176; positivism in, 36–37; production in, 80; productivity vs. domestic
INDEX
distribution in, 41, 50; and psychology,
31, 212; revolution in, 32, 58; in Rocco,
37, 57, 108; and Roman Catholic
Church, 40; sacrifice in, 50; self in, 98;
society in, 38; in Sorel, 81; state in, 58,
86; and syndicalism, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33,
35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 39, 54, 55, 56, 57,
58, 59, 61, 80, 85, 86, 99, 103, 108,
109; in syndicalism, 37; technology in,
59; workers in, 39, 56; and World
War I, 55
nationality: in Gentile, 189; in Olivetti, 53;
in Panunzio, 78, 79, 144, 145; and
World War I, 53
National Socialism: anti-Semitism in, 217,
257n, 259; in Costamagna, 189; in
Evola, 158n, 199, 201, 205, 210, 219;
and Fascism, 2, 4, 179–80, 193, 195,
217, 220, 258, 259; Jews in, 220; living
space in, 184; in Mussolini, 211, 213–
14; in Panunzio, 155, 156, 158; race in,
158, 185, 187, 188, 193, 194, 195, 201,
206n, 211, 213–14, 216. See also Germany; Hitler, Adolf
national socialism, 54, 55
national syndicalism, 32, 33, 35, 36, 56,
57, 58, 79, 80, 81, 83, 88, 89, 103,
108, 110, 230. See also nationalism;
syndicalism
nation-state, 31, 89, 129, 181
nature, 94, 123, 124. See also science
neofascism, viii
neo-Hegelianism: in Gentile, 83; in Mussolini, 55; and national syndicalism, 83; in
Panunzio, 75, 82, 145, 151, 161, 162;
and Rousseau, 147; in Spirito, 91. See
also Hegel, G.W.F.
New Economic Policy (NEP), 104
Niceforo, Alfredo, 62, 212
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 36
Nordic race, 200, 201, 202, 204, 207, 208
North Africa, 47
Nuovi studi di diritto, economica e
politica, 109
object, 94, 159
objectivity, 92–93, 94, 124, 125, 203–4
Olivetti, A. O., 29–30, 35, 36, 37, 52–53,
54, 58, 80–81, 85, 193, 235, 249
ontology, 94, 195
ophelimity, 126, 127
INDEX
Orano, Paolo, 29–30, 35, 36, 54, 58, 62,
85, 168; Gli Ebrei in Italia, 257–58
organizations. See associations/
organizations
owners, 232, 237, 238. See also property
Pact of Steel, 139
Pantaleoni, Maffeo, 102, 103
Panunzio, Sergio: and Associazione nazionalista italiano, 89; and Austria-Hungary, 78; and Carta del lavoro, 150; and
Dottrina del fascismo, 150, 151; and fascio interventionista, 77; and Germany,
78, 79; and Italy, 79, 104, 175; and restoration of Fascism, 227; and World War I,
77–79, 80, 82–83, 89, 143, 145, 148,
154; and World War II, 176; Ideas on:
Actualism, 83, 86, 88, 89, 141, 142,
150, 152, 159, 161–62; anarchism, 86;
aristocracy, 66, 76, 88; authoritarianism,
73, 86, 176; authority, 70, 71, 73, 74–
76, 75, 77; Bolshevism, 155, 156, 157;
capitalism, 69–70; class, 68–69, 69, 72,
78, 156, 157; class conflict, 66, 67, 68,
72, 145; collectivity, 67, 68, 73, 90, 103,
141; community, 71–72, 74, 75, 76, 79,
151; consensus, 176; corporativism, 73,
76, 79, 141, 142, 143, 173, 174, 176;
culture, 79; democracy, 72, 176; destiny,
74; dictatorship, 155; economy, 69, 72,
74, 75, 80, 103, 104, 141, 143, 157,
176; education, 74, 156; elite, 66, 74,
80, 148–49, 149, 176; empiricism, 71,
74, 75; entrepreneurs, 79; Fascism, 66,
83, 86, 154–55, 158–59; freedom, 76; future, 69, 70, 76; futurism, 83; general
strike, 66, 73, 79; heroes, 66; history,
69, 73, 78, 79, 82, 149, 151, 152, 154,
155; human beings, 71, 75, 82; idealism,
74, 76, 81, 82, 90, 151, 152, 161, 162;
immanence, 159; imperialism, 144; individual, 72, 76, 77, 82, 83, 86, 90, 141,
146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 174; industrial unions, 76; industry, 72, 76,
143; institutions of corporativism, 173;
justice, 75, 82; law, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73–
76, 77, 79, 82, 83, 143, 145, 154–55;
leaders, 80, 148, 155; liberalism, 86,
141, 176; libertarianism, 83, 90; masses,
80, 149; materialism, 156; middle class,
72, 73, 76, 79; militarism, 66; military,
72, 156; mission, 80; modernity, 76, 79;
275
morality, 69, 71, 72, 76, 82, 141, 145,
146, 147, 151, 162, 253; myths, 80; nation, 78, 80, 89, 143, 146, 151, 157; nationalism, 80, 83, 85, 90, 108, 141; nationality, 78, 79, 144, 145; national
syndicalism, 79, 80, 83, 88, 89, 103,
108; order, 83; parliament, 72, 79, 141;
patriotism, 66; philosophy, 74, 76, 77,
81, 143, 151; plutocracy, 176; politics,
141, 156; positivism, 62, 74, 81, 90,
145; pragmatism in, 81; private property, 103; production, 103; profit, 69;
proletariat, 66, 72–73, 76, 80, 157; property, 77; race, 158, 226; religion, 156,
161; representation, 72, 79, 150, 176;
revolution, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72–73, 74,
75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 86, 88, 104, 156,
157, 159, 253; scientism, 81; self, 152;
self-government, 90; sentiment, 145; socialism, 66, 69, 70, 77, 83; social psychology, 68, 73; social sciences, 67, 68,
82, 143, 145; society, 68, 70, 71, 73, 75,
77, 79, 82, 141, 143–44, 145; sociology,
74–75, 145; solidarity, 83; sovereignty,
73, 143, 144; Soviet Union, 155, 156–
58; spirituality, 82, 145, 151; state, 66,
72, 73, 75, 76, 79, 86, 88, 89, 90, 103,
104, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 151,
152, 157, 174; state syndicalism, 90; syndicalism, 66, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80,
86, 89, 90, 103, 108, 143; syndicates,
76; totalitarianism, 155, 157; transcendence, 161; truth, 82; violence, 73–74,
77, 252–53; vitalism, 90; voluntary associations, 76; will, 73, 77, 146, 147, 149;
workers, 66, 68, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 76,
79, 80, 173, 176, 235; In relation to:
Bergson, 90; Croce, 75, 82; Engels, 67,
157; Gentile, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 142,
150, 152, 159, 161, 162, 235; Gioberti,
152, 161; Gumplowicz, 67, 69, 82, 90;
Hegel, 74, 86, 90, 141, 148, 151, 152,
162; Hitler, 158; Kant, 74, 75, 76, 77,
82, 83, 90, 141, 145; Marx, 67, 69, 72,
82, 157; Marxism, 67, 68–69, 90, 104,
156, 158; Mazzini, 152, 161; Mussolini,
77, 89; National Socialism, 155, 156,
158; neo-Hegelianism, 75, 82, 145, 151,
161, 162; Pellizzi, 241; Roman Catholic
Church, 160, 161; Rosmini, 152, 161;
Rousseau, 74, 77, 146–47, 148; Sorel,
68, 80, 82, 86, 90; Spaventa, 161, 162;
276
Panunzio, Sergio (cont’d)
Spirito, 91, 135, 142; Vico, 152, 161;
WORKS: Il concetto della guerra giusta,
82; Il diritto e l’autorita, 74–75, 76; Una
nuova aristocrazia sociale: I sindacati,
66; La persistenza del diritto, 70–71, 72;
Sindacalismo e Medio Evo, 76; “Socialismo, sindacalismo e sociologia,” 67; “Il
socialismo e la guerra,” 77; Il socialismo
giuridico, 70; Lo stato di diritto, 76;
“Stato e sindacati,” 85, 86; “Lo stato fascista,” 90; Teoria generale dello stato fascista, 151, 161
Papini, Giovanni, 25, 26–27
Pareto, Vilfredo, 17, 27, 32, 37, 67, 102–3,
120, 124, 126–27, 212
parliament: in Actualism, 141; competitive
politics in, 63; in Corradini, 30–31, 32,
49; factionalism in, 43; failures of, 41,
49–50; in Fascism, 107; in Mussolini,
107; in nationalism, 32, 36, 41, 58; in
Olivetti, 36; in Panunzio, 72, 79, 141; in
Pellizzi, 167; in Rocco, 43, 51; in Sorel,
64; in syndicalism, 31, 32, 36, 54
Partito fascista repubblicano, 227, 232
Partito nazionale fascista, 98, 162,
166, 174
party, 122, 137, 142, 155–56
Paul VI, 198
Pellizzi, Camillo: and Civilità Fascista,
242; Fascismo-aristocrazia, 166; and
Germany, 176; and Great Britain, 176;
and Istituto nazionale di cultura fascista,
166, 169, 179, 241; and Italy, 166–67,
172, 174, 176; Problemi e realtà del fascismo, 166; and United States, 176; and
World War I, 172, 176; Ideas on: Actualism, 167, 168, 172, 176, 177, 243; aristocracy, 172, 173, 174, 176; authority,
170; Bolshevism, 243; civilization, 176,
177; class conflict, 167; corporativism,
165, 169, 170–71, 173, 242–43; democracy, 171; economy, 102, 170, 242; education, 173, 241; elite, 173; Fascism,
176, 242–43; heroes, 172; history, 172;
idealism, 176; imperialism, 176, 177,
179, 184; individual, 171; industrialization, 243; industry, 170, 172; leadership,
170, 171, 172–73; liberalism, 171; materialism, 102; morality, 102, 167, 176,
242; nation, 176, 177; nationalism, 176;
parliament, 167; production, 171, 242;
INDEX
race, 186, 190, 226; revolution, 176,
177; Rome, 177; socialism, 167; spirituality, 176–77; state, 170, 172, 177; syndicalism, 173, 259–60; totalitarianism,
170, 171; transcendence, 177; workers,
171, 236; In relation to: Gentile, 167,
172, 241, 243; Mussolini, 167, 170,
171, 172, 241; Panunzio, 241; Roman
Catholic Church, 167, 168, 169;
Schmitt, 180, 185; Spirito, 167, 241; Volpicelli, 167
Piccoli, Valentino, 54
Pierandrei, F., 180, 186
plutocracy, 33–34, 37, 101, 110, 176, 178,
214, 225, 230, 233
politics, 3, 4, 30, 46, 87, 141, 156, 236
Popolo d’Italia, Il, 81
positivism: in Actualism, 123–25, 126; in
Ardigo, 62; in Corradini, 28–29; in
Evola, 203, 209, 210; and liberalism,
126, 127; in Marxism, 29, 62; in Mussolini, 53; in nationalism, 36–37; in Niceforo, 62; and Orano, 62; in Panunzio,
62, 74, 81, 90, 145; in Pareto, 124; of
Pareto, 17; and socialism, 62; in Spirito,
91, 92, 123–24; in syndicalism, 36–37
Pound, Ezra, 227
pragmatism, 81, 92–93
Preziosi, Giovanni, 194, 219, 220,
226, 228
Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 25
primordialism, 38, 39
production: in Associazione nazionalista
italiano, 50; collective control of, 103;
and confederation, 237; in Corradini,
32, 48, 48–49; domestic commodity, 45;
duality in, 236, 237, 240; in Fascism,
12–14, 111, 128; in Fontanelli, 240; in
Gentile, 242; German oversight of, 244–
45; during Great Depression, 129; in Jouhaux, 81; in Marx, 46; in Mussolini,
100, 108, 136; in nationalism, 80; in
Olivetti, 52; in Panunzio, 103; in Pellizzi, 171, 242; planned, 243; private organization of, 117; in Rocco, 48, 111;
single organization for, 237, 238; socialization of, 232; in Sorel, 242; in Spirito,
239; state control of, 172, 243; state interference in, 100; and syndicates, 129;
and totalitarianism, 171; workers in,
233–34, 240, 243
productivity, 41, 45, 46, 48
INDEX
progress, 47–48
proletarianization, 6
proletariat: in Associazione nazionalista
italiano, 50; in Bernstein, 61; in Bombacci, 230; in Corradini, 27, 33; in Corridoni, 57, 101; dictatorship of, 157; and
Fascism, 14; Gramsci on, 10; in Marxism, 10; maturity of, 56, 57; in Panunzio, 66, 72–73, 76, 80, 157; in Papini,
26; and plutocracies, 33–34; and revolution, 1, 6, 11, 20, 33, 56; in Sorel, 65,
66, 68. See also workers
property: alienation of, 138; as historical
and social product, 118; holders of, 113;
in Mussolini, 229; ownership of, 118; in
Panunzio, 77, 103; private, 103, 137,
139, 229, 237; private vs. corporative,
132–33; social character of, 117, 132;
state control of, 237. See also owners
“Protection of Motherhood and Infancy”
program, 105
Provincial Councils of Corporative Economy, 130
psychology, 26, 27, 29–30, 32, 68, 73,
212, 230. See also social sciences;
sociology
race: in Actualism, 189, 190, 194, 195; in
Cantimori, 186; in Clauss, 207–8; in Costamagna, 187, 188, 189–90; in Evola,
158n, 200–201, 202–3, 204–6, 208–10,
212, 219, 221, 222, 225–26; in Fascism,
185–90, 193–95, 200, 211–12, 213,
214–17, 220, 225–26, 257–59; in Gentile, 185n, 188, 189, 194, 226; in Germany, 185, 187, 218, 225; in Gumplowicz, 212; in Hitler, 158, 185, 214, 215,
225; and homogeneity, 185–86, 187; in
law, 216; and leadership, 188; in Movimento socialista italiano, 261; in Mussolini, 193, 211, 213–15, 218; in National
Socialism, 158, 185, 187, 188, 193, 194,
195, 201, 206n, 211, 213–14, 216, 217;
in Niceforo, 212; in Olivetti, 193; in Panunzio, 158, 226; in Pareto, 212; in Pellizzi, 186, 190, 226; in Pierandrei, 186;
in Preziosi, 194, 226; in Rey, 186; in
Schmitt, 187; in Spirito, 226; in Volpicelli, 186. See also anti-Semitism; Jews
Radical party, 37
Raetzel, Friedrich, 67
Rahn, Rudolph, 245
277
Ratzenhofer, Gustav, 67
reality: in Evola, 195; objective, 94; in Spirito, 94, 95; state as antecedent and transcendental, 114; in Western thought, 112
Rechsstaat, 76, 77
Regno, Il, 25
religion, 125, 156, 159–60, 161, 167–68,
197. See also Roman Catholic Church
Renaissance, 123
representation, 55, 72, 79, 87, 120, 150,
173, 174, 175, 176. See also democracy;
elections
Repubblica sociale italiano, 219, 227, 228,
240; Council of Ministers of, 230, 231
revolution: anticapitalist, 18; in Associazione nazionalista italiano, 50; in Bombacci, 230; conditions for, 20, 56; in Corradini, 27, 32; in Corridoni, 56–57, 101;
in economy, 20, 56; elite in, 121; in Europe, 23; in Evola, 196, 197; international, 24, 157; left-wing vs. right-wing,
18; in Marx, 46; in Marxism, 20, 24,
56; in Mussolini, 100, 102, 225, 226,
229, 230, 234, 241; in nationalism, 32;
in nation-state, 31; in Panfilo Gentile,
51, 52; in Panunzio, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72–
73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 86, 88, 104,
156, 157, 159, 253; in Pellizzi, 176, 177;
and proletariat, 1, 6, 11, 20, 33, 56; in
socialism, 63–64; in Sorel, 64, 65, 81; in
Spirito, 134; in syndicalism, 32, 55; in
syndicalism vs. nationalism, 58; and
World War I, 53
Rey, L. Vannutelli, 180, 186
Ricci, Vittorio Rolando, 228
Rocca, Massimo, 35
Rocco, Alfredo: and Associazione nazionalista italiano, 43; and World War I, 49,
60; Ideas on: authoritarianism, 51; capitalism, 44; collectivism, 43; corporativism, 59–60; culture, 43; democracy, 43,
58, 60; economy, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 51,
103, 153; entrepreneurs, 44, 60; Europe,
43; history, 48, 49, 51; imperialism, 48;
individual, 43, 44, 153; industry, 42, 43,
44, 45, 49, 50, 51; liberalism, 44, 49–
50, 60, 153; military, 49; nationalism,
37, 57, 108; national syndicalism, 83;
parliament, 43, 51; production, 48, 111;
productivity, 45; redistribution, 50; socialism, 44–45; sovereignty, 51, 60;
state, 42, 51, 59–60, 103, 153; syndical-
278
Rocco, Alfredo (cont’d)
ism, 57; workers, 51; In relation to: Corradini, 42, 48, 49, 57; Corridoni, 57;
Gentile, 85; List, 43, 44, 45, 48; Marxism, 37, 44–45; Mussolini, 42; Olivetti,
54; Orano, 54; Roman Catholic Church,
58–59
Roman Catholic Church: and Actualism,
160–61, 167–68; and corporativism, 59;
in Costamagna, 187, 188; and Dottrina
del fascismo, 160; and Evola, 198, 199,
201; and Fascism, 160; and first nationalist congress, 38; and Gentile, 133, 167,
168, 169, 188; and immanence, 167;
and Italian Nationalist Association, 58–
59; and Mussolini, 160, 168–69, 198,
199, 218, 228; in nationalism, 40; in
Orano, 168; and Panunzio, 160, 161;
and Pellizzi, 167, 168, 169; and Rocco,
58–59; sovereignty of, 199; in Spirito,
91, 238; and state, 24, 59; and totalitarianism, 167–68; transcendence in, 167.
See also religion
Rome, ancient, 177, 187, 198, 209, 254
Rosmini, Antonio, 152, 161
Rossoni, Edmondo, 249
Rousseau, J. J., 64, 74, 77, 119, 122,
146–47, 148
RSI. See Repubblica sociale italiano
Rüstungs und Kriegsindustrie (RUK),
244–45
sacrifice, 24, 50, 65, 149, 153, 154, 210
Schmitt, Carl, 179–88, 189; Der Begriff
des Politischen, 179, 187; extended
space in, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 185,
190, 194–95; Principii politici del Nazionalsocialismo, 179–80; Staat, Bewegung,
Volk, 186, 187; Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot
für raumfremde Mächte, 179
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 36
science: in Actualism, 123–25, 126; and
corporativism, 134; in Corradini, 28–29;
deterministic, 53; empirical, 125; in
Evola, 203–4, 209, 212; in Fascism, 212;
and human beings, 53; and liberalism,
123–24, 127; and Marxism, 29, 69; in
Mussolini, 53, 212, 213; objectivity in,
125, 203–4; positivist, 28–29, 123–25,
126; presuppositions of, 125; in Sorel,
65; in Spirito, 123–24, 124, 126
INDEX
scientism, 29, 74, 81, 83n, 91, 123, 198
Second Congress of Syndicalist and Corporativist Studies, 109, 111
self: absolute, 96; in Actualism, 96–97, 98,
109; actualization of, 96–97, 98, 147,
154, 240, 255; collective, 95, 96; commitment of, 147; communal, 97; empirical, 87, 96, 97; fulfillment of, 153; in
Gentile, 55, 87, 96, 96–97, 109, 147,
152, 171; in Hegel, 97; interaction with
others, 98; in liberalism, 97; in nationalism, 98; in Panunzio, 152; profound,
96–97; realization of, 55, 109, 112, 141,
152, 256; in Spirito, 95, 152; state identified with, 97, 112; in syndicalism, 98;
transcendental, 87, 95, 96–97, 147. See
also individual
sentiment, 27, 29, 30, 54, 77, 82, 145, 147
Sighele, Scipio, 30, 35, 40
Sismondi, J. C., 148
Smith, Adam, 24
socialism: abandonment of, 58; in Associazione nazionalista italiano, 50; in Bombacci, 230; and capitalism, 50; class conflict in, 25; and corporativism, 134; in
Corradini, 28; defeat of by Fasci di combattimento, 10; and democracy, 41, 63;
determinism of, 54; disintegration of,
80; distribution of material benefits in,
50, 58; economy in, 50; in Evola, 198; in
France, 63–64; German, 62; in Giovanni
Gentile, 235; historic laws in, 63; industry in, 50; internationalism of, 40; and
liberalism, 63; and Marxism, 24, 61; materialism of, 54; and Mussolini, 53–54,
104, 241; in Olivetti, 36, 52, 80; in Panfilo Gentile, 51, 52; in Panunzio, 66, 69,
70, 77, 83; in Pareto, 102; in Pellizzi,
167; and positivism, 62; productivity in,
50; reformist and revisionist, 61–64; revolution in, 63–64; in Rocco, 42, 44–45;
and Sorel, 64–65; in Spirito, 134, 135,
239; state, 170; in Turati, 63. See also
Marx, Karl; Marxism
socialization, of economy, 228, 230, 231,
232, 244, 245
social sciences, 67, 68, 82, 120, 122, 123,
124, 143, 145. See also psychology;
sociology
Societa finanziaria italiana (Sofondit),
137, 138
INDEX
society: in Actualism, 141; in Associazione
nazionalista italiano, 50; education by,
119; in Engels, 67; enterprise in, 117; in
Evola, 201; and Gumplowicz, 67, 68; historic laws in, 63; and human beings,
124, 141; as immanent, 141; and individual, 126, 154; intermediate agencies in,
118; and law, 69, 70, 71; in Marx, 67; in
Mussolini, 229; and nation, 144; in nationalism, 38; in Olivetti, 52; in Panunzio, 17, 68, 70, 73, 75, 77, 79, 82, 141,
143–44, 145; in Pareto, 127; and property, 117, 118, 132; in Sorel, 65; and
state, 144; in Turati, 63; will of, 171. See
also collective/collectivity; community
sociology, 27, 74–75, 145. See also psychology; social sciences
Soffici, Ardengo, 227
Sofondit. See Societa finanziaria italiana
(Sofondit)
soldier-producer, 34
Sombart, Werner, 67
Sorel, Georges, 17, 28, 37, 54, 64–66, 68,
70, 78, 81, 82, 86, 90, 242, 252–53; L’Avenir socialiste des syndicats, 64; “The
Juridical Ideas of Marxism,” 70; Reflections on Violence, 64
sovereignty, 51, 60, 73, 143, 144, 199
Soviet Union, 9, 21, 77, 100, 102, 138,
155, 156–58, 192, 243, 258. See also
Bolshevism
Spain, 192
Spaventa, Bertrando, 151, 161, 162; Principii di Etica, 87n
Spencer, Herbert, 30, 67
Spirito, Ugo: background of, 90–91; and
Carta del lavoro, 117, 237; at Ferrara
conference on corporativism, 133, 134,
135, 136, 140, 232, 236; and Great Depression, 130; and Nuovi studi di diritto,
economica e politica, 109; orthodoxy of,
135–36; Ideas on: activity, 92; Actualism, 92, 93, 94, 97, 99, 109, 111, 133,
236; autarky, 135n; Bolshevism, 134,
135, 239; capital, 131; capitalism, 238–
39; categories, 95; collective consciousness, 94; collectivity, 110; communism,
239; consciousness, 94, 95–96; corporations, 132–33; corporativism, 98, 111,
112–13, 116, 119, 129, 130, 131–36,
140, 141, 142, 237, 238, 239, 241; decision, 95; determinism, 95; economy,
279
107, 109, 116–17, 123, 126, 127, 130–
36, 139, 236, 238, 239; empiricism, 92,
94, 95; entrepreneurs, 131; epistemology, 92, 93, 94; Fascism, 91–92, 132,
238; free enterprise, 116–17; human beings, 124; human consciousness, 93; humanism, 259; idealism, 92, 94, 238; individual, 109, 123, 127, 238, 239;
intellectuals, 94; judgment, 95; knowledge, 92, 94; liberalism, 109, 123, 126,
236, 238, 239; materialism, 93, 94, 95;
morality, 94, 95, 96; nature, 94; object,
94; objectivity, 92–93, 94; ontology, 94;
ophelimity, 126, 127; politics, 236; positivism, 91, 92, 123–24; pragmatism, 92–
93; production, 239; race, 226; reality,
94, 95; revolution, 134; science, 124,
126; scientism, 91, 123; self, 95, 152; socialism, 134, 135, 239; spirituality, 94;
state, 109, 132, 135, 258; subject, 94;
subjectivity, 95; syndicalism, 109; thinking, 94, 95; totalitarianism, 110, 238,
239; truth, 92–93, 94; Western thought,
112; workers, 131, 236–37, 238; In relation to: Evola, 195–96; Fontanelli, 240;
Gentile, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 110, 111,
238, 239, 259; Kant, 94; Lenin, 93n; Malaparte, 92; Marx, 93n; Marxism, 91;
Mussolini, 91, 131, 135–36, 137, 239,
240n, 244n; neo-Hegelianism in, 91; Panunzio, 91, 135, 142; Pellizzi, 167, 241;
Roman Catholic Church, 91, 238;
WORKS: Capitalismo e corporativismo,
109; La critica dell’economia liberale,
109; I fondamenti dell’economia corporativa, 109; “The Individual and the
State in the Corporative Economy,”
130–31; II pragmatismo nella filosofia
contemporanea, 92
spirituality: in Actualism, 168; in Costamagna, 187; in Evola, 196, 201, 204–5,
206, 207, 209, 210, 219; in Gentile, 86,
94, 96, 98, 176, 189; in List, 45; in Missiroli, 55; in Mussolini, 55, 88n, 149n;
national, 45; in Panunzio, 82, 145, 151;
in Pellizzi, 176–77; in Rocco, 57; in
Spirito, 94
squadristi, 166, 197
Stalin, Josef, 12, 93n, 157, 158
Starace, Achille, 166
state: in Actualism, 141; agencies of, 118;
as antecedent and transcendental reality,
280
state (cont’d)
114; and associations, 90, 118; and autarky, 170; authority of, 75; and Church,
24; as core of individual, 114; corporations as organ of, 133; corporative institutions of, 123; and corporativism, 35,
59–60, 110, 117, 170; in Corradini,
153; credit controlled by, 138; decentralized, 101; early support for, 24; economic control by, 101, 106, 107, 108,
110, 117, 129, 132, 138, 139, 140; and
economy, 100–101, 170; education by,
121; and entrepreneurs, 35; ethical, 99,
148; in Evola, 196, 197; as executive
will, 171; in Fascism, 99, 101, 255; in
Giovanni Gentile, 86–87, 99, 152, 171,
176, 189; in Hegel, 133; hierarchical,
171; and individual, 127, 152, 153, 174;
individual defended by, 112, 114, 148;
individual identification with, 55, 86,
98, 112, 113, 116, 128, 129, 131, 133,
134, 136, 154, 238; industrial control
by, 110, 138, 140; and industrialists’ organizations, 108; and industry, 54; integralist, 60; intellectual environment of,
118; intermediate agencies in, 118; in
Italian Nationalist Association, 58; juridical, 148; and law, 75, 76, 112; in Lenin,
9, 157; Manchestrian, 101, 106, 107,
110, 137, 154; and Marxism, 157; as mediator, 53, 237; in Missiroli, 55; moral
environment of, 118; in Mussolini, 55,
100, 110, 136, 137, 157; in nationalism,
58, 86; and national syndicalism, 110;
nested associations of, 118; in Olivetti,
52–53; in Panfilo Gentile, 51–52; in Panunzio, 66, 72, 73, 75, 76, 79, 86, 88,
89, 90, 103, 104, 141, 143, 144, 145,
146, 148, 151, 152, 157, 174; in Pareto,
102; and Partito nazionale fascista, 98;
and party, 155; in Pellizzi, 170, 172,
177; production controlled by, 172, 243;
property controlled by, 237; in Rocco,
42, 51, 59–60, 103, 153; sacrifice to,
153; self identified with, 97, 112; socialist, 170; and society, 144; sovereignty of,
144; in Soviet Union, 9; in Spirito, 109,
132, 135, 238; and syndicalism, 51, 52,
54, 86, 90; and syndicalism vs. nationalism, 58; syndicalist-corporativist, 79; totalitarian, 99, 110, 134; and trans-class
INDEX
interests, 53; in Western thought, 112;
and workers, 110, 117, 237; and workers’ organizations, 108
Stato, Lo, 186
Sternhell, Zeev, 9, 17
STET (telephonic communications), 138
stock owner, 131, 239
subject, 94, 159
subjectivity, 95, 124
syndicalism: in Actualism, 85; and class,
32, 36, 55; collectivism in, 55; and community, 31, 32, 123; in Corradini, 28,
29, 31–32, 37, 57; and democracy, 36,
107; economy in, 101, 128; and elite,
32, 36; and Engels, 52; in Evola, 201; in
Fascism, 61, 99, 170; and first nationalist congress, 38; in Fontanelli, 259–60;
in Gentile, 85, 86, 91; human beings in,
30; individual in, 39, 55, 58, 98; industry in, 52, 56, 247; and Italian Nationalist Association, 57; in Labriola, 66; leaders in, 32, 36; and Marx, 52; Marxism
in, 37, 56; masses in, 31, 32; mass movements in, 29–30; materialism in, 86; military in, 55, 58; morality in, 37; and Mussolini, 99, 109; myth in, 29; nation in,
31–32, 55, 58; national, 32, 33, 35, 36,
56, 57, 58, 79, 80, 81, 83, 88, 103, 108,
110; and nationalism, 28, 30, 31, 32,
35, 37, 38, 39, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59,
61, 80, 85, 86, 99, 103, 108, 109; and
nationalist loyalty, 37; in Olivetti, 35,
36, 37; in Panunzio, 66, 72, 73, 74, 77,
78, 79, 80, 86, 89, 90, 103, 108, 143;
parliament in, 31, 32, 36, 54; in Pellizzi,
173, 259–60; positivism in, 36–37; and
psychology, 31; representation in, 55;
and revolution, 32, 55, 58; in Rocco, 57;
self in, 98; in Sorel, 81; in Spirito, 109;
and state, 51, 52, 54, 58, 86, 90; violence in, 252; workers in, 32, 36, 39, 52,
56, 235; and World War I, 55, 56
syndicates: confederations of, 130; as consultative, 173, 175; in corporativism,
175; employer, 173; law on, 130; in Panunzio, 76; and production, 129; in totalitarian state, 134; workers’, 173
Tarde, Gabriel, 37, 67
Tasca, Angelo, 2, 54
Tassoni, Alessandro, 22
INDEX
technicians, 232, 239, 240, 243
technology, 12, 13, 19, 44, 49, 59, 238.
See also industry
thinking, 94, 95, 96, 115–16. See also epistemology; knowledge
Third International, 10, 12
totalitarianism: corporations in, 134; and
democracy, 119–20; in Evola, 198; in
Fascism, 84, 97, 99, 107, 256; in Gentile, 87, 110, 247; individual in, 97; leadership in, 149–50; in Movimento socialista italiano, 261; in Mussolini, 98, 107,
110, 137; in Panunzio, 155, 157; in Pellizzi, 170, 171; and production, 171;
and Roman Catholic Church, 167–68;
Soviet, 157; in Spirito, 110, 238, 239;
and state, 99, 110, 134; syndicates in,
134; and will, 146; and workers, 171
trade, 24, 33–34, 40
transcendence, 161, 177
Tricolore, 35
Tripoli, 41, 54, 55, 77
Tripolitania, 35
truth, 82, 92–93, 94, 205, 208, 213
Turati, Filippo, 63
Turkey, 35–36, 40
unions, 36, 76
United States, 47, 176, 223
urban population, 10, 12, 105
Ur-fascism, viii, 2
Utopia, 55
Valli, Luigi, 38, 39, 40
Viana, Mario, 35
Vico, Giambattista, 22, 152, 161
Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy, 88,
106, 219, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 234
violence, 3, 8, 15, 17, 63, 73–74, 77, 89,
141, 250–54, 255, 256
Voce, La, 26
Volpicelli, Arnaldo, 107, 109, 119, 167,
179–80, 186
Ward, Lester, 67
warrior-producer, 78, 80, 81. See also
heroes
Western thought, 112, 120. See also
liberalism
will: in Actualism, 146; as Christian conscience, 146; common, 148, 150; demo-
281
cratic expression of, 150; and elite, 149;
embodied in one person, 171; empirical,
146; general, 87, 119, 121, 122, 123, 146,
147, 148, 149; in Gentile, 86, 87, 146; and
morality, 148, 149; in Mussolini, 53, 193;
national, 86; objective, 148; in Olivetti, 36;
in Panunzio, 73, 77, 146, 147, 149; in
Rousseau, 122, 146; of society, 171; state
as executive, 171; and totalitarianism, 146;
transcendental, 119, 121, 123
Wolff, Karl, 245
Woltmann, Ludwig, 204
workers: as agents, 243; as aristocracy, 66,
242; associations of, 35, 76, 108, 130;
and corporativism, 59, 134, 232, 238,
239; in Corradini, 31, 33; cultural character of, 236, 239; disputes of, 35; division of, 71; early support for, 24; and
economy, 232–34; as elite, 242; emigration of, 25, 27, 33, 40, 42; in enterprise
hierarchy, 133; and entrepreneurs, 35; exploitation of, 69; in Fascism, 105; in Fontanelli, 236, 240, 242, 243; general
strike by, 66, 73, 79; in Gentile, 86, 98,
235, 235–36, 242; governance by, 229,
232–34, 242; hierarchy of organized,
134; individual bias of, 132; in Italian Socialist party, 61; in Italian Social Republic, 231, 232–33; law concerning, 130;
leaders of, 36; and managers, 232, 233,
238; in Marx, 70; in Mussolini, 12, 108,
109, 136, 193, 225, 229, 233–34; in nationalism, 39, 56; in Olivetti, 37, 52,
235; and owners, 232; ownership by,
237; in Panunzio, 66, 68, 69–70, 71, 72,
73, 76, 79, 80, 173, 176, 235; in Pellizzi,
171, 236; and production, 240; in production, 233–34; production planned by,
243; public works employment of, 138;
in Rocco, 51; self-actualization of, 240;
self-development of, 241, 242; skill acquisition by, 240–41; skilled vs. unskilled, 240; and socialization of economy, 245; and social responsibility, 117;
in Sorel, 64, 70, 81; in Spirito, 131,
236–37, 238; and state, 117; state control of, 110; state as mediator for, 237;
as stockholders, 132–33; in syndicalism,
32, 36, 39, 52, 56, 235; and technology,
238; and totalitarianism, 171; triumph
282
workers (cont’d)
of, 63; upward mobility of, 240. See also
Carta del lavoro, La; proletariat
World War I, 19, 51, 57; and Corradini,
49; and economy, 5; end of, 86, 88; and
Gentile, 91; and Italy, 5, 77; and Mussolini, 53–54; and nationalism, 55; nationality in, 53; in Olivetti, 53; outbreak of,
54; in Panunzio, 77–79, 80, 82–83, 89,
143, 145, 148, 154; in Pellizzi, 172, 176;
INDEX
and revolution, 53; in Rocco, 49, 60;
and syndicalism, 55, 56
World War II, 8, 139, 140; Gramsci on, 10,
11; and Great Britain, 223; and Italy,
176, 179, 183, 195, 222, 224; and Mussolini, 13, 218; in Panunzio, 176; and
United States, 223; and views of
Fascism, 1, 2, 4
Zetkin, Clara, 12